ISSN 1360-4813 printISSN 1470-3629 online01010007-20 copy 2001 Taylor amp Francis LtdDOI 1010801360481012005786 8

CITY VOL 5 NO 1 2001

Invisible citiesA phenomenology of globalization from below

Eduardo Mendieta1

That the city consumes its hinterland its outlying areas of supply and its cultures and peopleseems at best an overstatement And yet it is a formulation that Eduardo Mendieta arrivesat as a result of a philosophical and ethical examination of a wide range of contemporarystudies of urbanization and globalization Mendietarsquos analysis begins with a critique ofaspects of Saskia Sassenrsquos important work on the territorial bases of globalization To thishe adds two further dimensions a phenomenological reading that is slanted towards theviewpoint of the oppressed and a theological reading of cultural and religious phenemonaand meanings(s) His approach involves a search for ldquothe invisible cities with the cities thatare visible in most urban theory and analysisrdquo What is also involved from an ethical andpractical viewpoint is not so much the inclusion of the excluded within the visible city as thedismantling and reconstruction of that city in the interests of the excluded

ldquoI have also thought of a model city fromwhich I deduce all othersrdquo Marcoanswered ldquoIt is a city made only ofexceptions exclusions incongruitiescontradictions If such a city is the mostimprobable by reducing the number ofabnormal elements we increase theprobability that the city really exists So Ihave only to subtract exceptions from mymodel and in whatever direction I proceedI will arrive at one of the cities whichalways as an exception exist But I cannotforce my operation beyond a certain limit Iwould achieve cities too probable to berealrdquo (Calvino 1974 p 69)

There are many who think global-ization to be the latest intellectualfashion devoid of content rich in

rhetoric and vitriol The polarization ofpositions concerning the meaning of glo-balization betrays less a substantive graspof the issues in question and more apenchant to use this word as stand in for

favourite straw man positions Nonethe-less we can say that globalization concernsthe fundamental issue whether our experi-ence as well as representation and con-ceptualization of the world have radicallyaltered in a way that neither ldquomodernityrdquonor ldquopost-modernityrdquo can any longergrasp or hope to render legible and intelli-gible At the core of the shift from thedebate about modernity versus post-modernity to the debate about the whenceand the whither of globalization is thequestion concerning the extent to whichour Weltanaschaung our conceptual gestaltof the planet of what we can also call thesaeculum that is the horizon of human lifeand history has already shifted so irrevers-ibly and radically as to require a newlexicon cartography and even imaginaryThose who denounce globalization for jus-tifiable reasons do so blinding themselvesto a new set of forces and even conceptualhorizon which if not discerned make their

8 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

criticisms vacuous and naive Those whodefend and blithely celebrate globalizationdo so only because they pay attention toone or two privileged and favourite aspectsof the process of global integration with-out regard or concern for its other aspectsIn this way these latter turn into spokes-persons of the worst aspects of this newworld order There is either too muchindeterminacy vague notions about whatconstitutes globalization or too much one-dimensionality privileging of one or twoareas of society as the catalysts of global-ization (Veseth 1998 Grossberg 1999Short et al 2000) This situation howeveris being masterfully remedied by the recentwork of Held McGrew Goldblatt andPerraton which synthesizes erudite analy-ses and masterful summaries They havealso gathered in a volume a wide spanningand heterogenous reading list of the differ-ent positions theories and analyses ofglobalization (Held et al 1999 Held andMcGrew 2000)

The following reflections hope to nav-igate a middle path between the Charybdisof euphoric and celebratory pronounce-ments about the ineluctability of global-ization by what many take to be the newapologists of a pax america and the Scyllaof equally strong but dismissive and vis-ceral counter-reactions to what many taketo be the latest scourge of capitalism in itshighest and most virulent form Thesereflections will be guided by the empiricallyinformed but deeply sensitive work ofSaskia Sassen who has pioneered what wecan call global sociology or sociology ofglobalization She has been contributingover the last two decades to what I take tobe one of the most sophisticated multi-layered detailed and comprehensive analy-ses of the new world economy and howthis new economy leaves the traces of itsform of accumulation in the physiognomyof the city Her work on immigrationsovereignty the ascendancy of a new post-national legal regime the unbundling ofnational economies and the re-territorial-

izing of global economic and social pro-cesses in the city have painted with broadbut masterful strokes a rich canvass of thenew geography of the political economy inthe age of digitization and finance capital(Sassen 1991 1996 1998 1999 2000)

One of the most important aspects ofSassenrsquos work and this is why it is anindispensable guide in our times is the wayit focuses on the city as a litmus test for oneof the central motifs of her work namelythe denationalizing of the national and thenationalizing of the global In Sassenrsquos workglobalization is not just about the mobilityof capital it is also about the mobility ofpeoples It is about the contestation ofnational policies by transnational andglobal processes and the emergence andformulation of new claims by social agentswithin local geopolitical spaces Indeed anew predominance of the discourse ofhuman rights which supersede and super-vene citizenship rights along with thecentrality of a politics of identity that isundergirded by a politics of presence are tobe understood as contestational and oppo-sitional strategies that face up to theunaccountability fluidity superlegalityand concentration of finance capital inglobal cities

After this critical but sympathetic discus-sion of these two aspects of Sassenrsquos work Iturn to the articulation of what I would liketo call a phenomenology of globalization Ifwe take globalization to be about Wel-tanschaungen gestalts and ways of seeingand reading the world and how these may ormay not correspond with our ldquoexperiencerdquoof the world then the logical tool of analysiswould appear to be phenomenology Byphenomenology is to be understood herethat method that sees concepts as embodiedpractices and practices as interpretative ormeaning granting schemata which in turn areseen as being part of a form of life or socio-historical environment There is no conceptwithout a practice and no practice without aworld In this second part then I seek tounderstand how globalization is an attempt

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 9

to come to terms in a concept and through afigure of thought with how our world islived differently in the age of simultaneityand the collapse of space-time to use Har-veyrsquos terms (Harvey 1989) and how newconceptual matrixes are required to makesense of the emergent forms of life (ie exilesdisplaced people migrants cyber-nomadsjetzet nomad intelligentsia not on the sameplane of power and survival)

The essay closes with a discussion City ofAngels of how ldquoreligionrdquo is rediscovered inthis new context and how resources may belocated within it that can contribute tomeeting the challenges of a globalized worldSuch a turn might be unexpected althoughnot unwarranted In the age of culturalhomogenization of the collapse of culturalborders in which MacDonald and Holly-wood have created a global lingua francadifferences must be highlighted discoveredif not created Religion has become impor-tant again because its seems to profile itselfas the one element of cultures that hasremained and this is contestable partiallyimmune to the homogenizing thrust of glo-balization Religion has become a reservoir ofresistance and difference Fundamentalismas many have noted is unthinkable withoutglobalization (Marty and Appleby 1991 p5) Yet religious renewals and the formationof new religions are also unthinkable with-out processes of globalization Converselyglobalization itself is both augured and accel-erated by processes of religious innovationproselytism and evangelization (Beyer 1994Stackhouse and Paris 2000 p 1 Hopkins etal forthcoming) The conceptual moral herewould be to disabuse ourselves of theEnlightenment prejudice perpetuated andexploited by the discourses on modernitythat religion had not been important had infact ceased to perform a social function andthat suddenly it had become once againnecessary As Jose Casanovarsquos work hasillustrated beautifully such myths defacedsocial reality and diminished theoreticalreflexivity (Casanova 1994 Luhmann 19962000 Mendieta forthcoming b)

I The territorialization of globalization

ldquoLarge cities in the highly developed worldare the places where globalization processesassume concrete localized forms Theselocalized forms are in good part whatglobalization is about We can then think ofcities also as the place where thecontradictions of the internationalization ofcapital either come to rest or conflict If weconsider further that large cities alsoconcentrate a growing share of disadvantagepopulationsmdashimmigrants in both Europeand the United States African Americansand Latinos in the United Statesmdashthen wecan see that cities have become a strategicterrain for a whole series of conflicts andcontradictionsrdquo (Sassen 2000 p 143emphasis added)

From among the many provocative aspectsof Sassenrsquos proposals for deciphering andmaking legible the geopolitics of informationmegapolises I would like to highlight twoaspects The first aspect is what I take to be akind of methodological caution that seems tolead Sassen to articulate her proposal in theform of a conditional in the form of anoption The other has to do with what I taketo be a seeming symmetry between agentsand actors within the new informationmegapolises

Some of Sassenrsquos work could be read asadvocating a kind of ldquomethodological humil-ityrdquo By this I mean that some of Sassenrsquostexts seem to project the idea that if we wantto understand the new geography of inequal-ity of the over-valorization of capital and thede-valorization of human potential as dualaspects of globalization that coagulate inspecific contestations within localizedspaces then we better look at global citiesThere is a conditionality here that seems tooffer an option as though we could under-stand the contemporary situation independ-ent of the new mega-urbanization anddemographic explosion that humanity isundergoing I grant Sassen the benefit of thedoubt and I assume that this ifndashthen type ofargumentation is really a rhetorical ploy

10 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Nonetheless I will suggest that there is noway in which we can understand what ishappening to the world to our societies toour environments to the seas to the airaround the entire planet and so on if we donot look at three related factors the unprec-edented concentration of humans in citiesthe growth of the human population and theincrease in certain forms of consumptionLet me cite a few statistics At the turn of the20th century 150 million people lived incities that is about one-tenth of the worldpopulation were city dwellers In contrastsby 2006 basically now it is estimated that32 billion people will live in cities which isa 20-fold increase (OrsquoMeara 1999 p 5)What this means is that for the first time inthe history of our species we have finallybegun to be predominantly city dwellersBut this is not the whole story While the19th and 20th centuries were the centuries ofthe great industrial metropolis of the so-called advanced world the so-called modernworld the cities of the 21st century will bethe cities of the developing world the so-called Third World the purportedly not-yetmodern world Note for instance that someof the largest cities today are in the southernsection of the geopolitical map Mexico City181 million Bombay 180 Sao Paulo 177Shanghai 142 Seoul 129 (State of theWorldrsquos Cities 1999)

In short the largest urbanizing areas of theplanet are those areas that are most vulner-able and perhaps least ready to assume thechallenges of massive concentrations of peo-ple in their already over-stretched urbancentres Let me be more specific While moreand more people migrate to cities in the so-called industrializing nations the disparitiesbetween the developed and the developingworld continues to grow Let me cite theHuman Development Report of 1998Twenty per cent of the worldrsquos people in thehighest income countries account for 86 oftotal private consumption while the poorest20 account for a minimal 13 Let me justnote also that the richest fifth (living in theinformation cities that Sassen studies)

d consume 58 of total energy while thepoorest fifth less that 4

d have 74 of all telephone lines thepoorest fifth 15

d consume 84 of all paper the poorestfifth 15

d own 87 of the worldrsquos vehicle fleet thepoorest fifth less that 1 (United NationsDevelopment Programme 1998 pp2ndash4)

To these ratios and statistics we would haveto add the telling statistics of the actualnumber of people who have computers accessto an internet connection wireless connec-tions and electricity Couple these abysmallyasymmetrical levels of consumption and own-ership with the fact that the fifth of worldpopulation in the wealthiest countries (USACanada Germany Japan France UK)account for 53 of carbon dioxide emissionswhile the poorest fifth for only 30

This all paints an apocalyptic picture adoomsday scenario not unlike that so pro-phetically captured by Ridley Scott in hisfilm Blade Runner which projects an anar-chical urban bazaar teeming with massesfrom all corners of the world speaking somepost-Babelian pidgin ever in the shadow ofdark clouds that conceal a fading sun alwaysbathed in radioactive rain

I would like now to turn to the secondaspect of my thematization of some aspectsof Sassenrsquos work Her analysis at least as it isreproduced here seems to leave open theway for an interpretation that would seeglobal financial interests global capital aspossessing the same type of leverage ashuman global actors have If we see the cityas a strategic site for the deployment ofdenationalizing and re-territorializing pro-cesses and contestations does this mean thatall agents are on the same level Is this newtopology of power characterized by a lev-elled plain And here I would have to sayno In other words it is not the case that theglobalizing that is operated and executed byglobal financial networks is of the samecharacter and extent as that which is enacted

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 11

by immigrants and women of colour tomention the actors Sassen mentions

I will go a step forward and focus on theUSA Home to at least four of the mostimportant megapolises in the circuits oftechnology information finance capital aswell as immigration and urban oppositionalpolitics from below (New York ChicagoLos Angeles and Miami) the USA has had along history of bias against cities Thesebiases are built into the tax structures at thefederal and local levels They are built into thevery policies of the Welfare State and theallocation of national wealth through devel-opment grants tax incentives brakes grantsand loans etc A whole series of factors hasbuilt a complex web of legal and tax codesinfra-structure construction developmentincentives etc that adversely affects the coreareas of cities and which simultaneouslyrewards urban sprawl privatization highwayconstruction and urban capital flight In briefin the USA at least very clearly and con-certedly since the end of World War IIhousing taxing educational highway con-structions policies etc have conspired toproduce the hollowing of cities and theexpansion of a socially wasteful and eco-logically devastating urban sprawl The majorinfo-megapolises of the New Brave World ofsurreal wealth are oases of grotesque luxuryin the midst of vast deserts of povertycrumbling infra-structure rusting bridgesbroken public phones poor and unsuitablepublic schools and the litany can go Thislogic of urban development in the USA hasbeen a luxury that can only be bought at theexpense of the asymmetries which I pointedout earlier And here I would like to referpeople to the work of Daniel D Luria andJoel Rogers on a new urban politics for the21st century (Jackson 1985 Massey andDenton 1993 Luria and Rogers 1999)

The point however that I am trying toelaborate is the following It is simply not thecase that different actors enter the territoryof the global city on the same level In fact itis a territory that is already organized in sucha way as to preclude certain agents from

confronting from elaborating their rights tothe city with the same level of force andefficacy that transnationals enact and enforcetheir claims on urban space My questionthen would be how do we develop ananalysis that takes into account the unlev-elled terrain that constitutes the new topol-ogy of power in which certain actors aremore clearly at a disadvantage than othersWhat new forms of legitimacy and politicscan we appeal to or begin to configure whenurban dwellers find themselves historicallycondemned to always stand in a substan-tively adverse situation of economic polit-ical and legal power vis-a-vis the sub-stantively effective legal financial andpolitical forces of globalizing finance capitalIn what way in short can we begin toelaborate a politics of the right to the city touse that felicitous phrase of Henri Lefebvrewhich unquestionably will become the num-ber one form of politics in this age of mega-cities and hyper-urbanization from thestandpoint of those who have been histor-ically excluded from exercising their rights totheir cities (Lefebvre 1969)

II A phenomenology of globalization

ldquoThe expression lsquophenomenologyrsquo can beformulated in Greek as legein taphainomena But legein meansapophainesthai Hence phenomenologymeans apophphainesthai taphainomena mdashto let what shows itself beseen from itself just as it shows itself fromitself That is the formal meaning of thetype of research that call itselflsquophenomenologyrsquo But this expressesnothing other than the maxim formulatedabove lsquoTo the things themselvesrsquo rdquo(Heidegger 1996 p 30)

I turn now to the presentation of what I calla phenomenology of globalization By aphenomenology of globalization I under-stand the analysis of those experiences thathuman beings in varying degrees are under-going as a result of new socio-economic-

12 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

cultural and political processes which in turncondition the horizon of all possible expecta-tions against which new experiences arepossible at all

Human experience happens against a spa-tio-temporal background the life-world Atthe same time human experience projectsitself forward into a horizon of expectationsthat is conditioned by the structures of thelife-world Human experience therefore isalways framed or structured by spatial andtemporal co-ordinates Ideas of the world orworld-views are coagulations of those spa-tio-temporal configurations (Giddens 19841987) Images of the world or world-imagesare ways in which we understand our rela-tionships to space and time For this reasonthe way we conceptualize the world imaginethe world mirrors the way we conceptualizeourselves as humans The point of thesereflections is to begin to think of global-ization as a way of viewing the world as animage of the world (Heidegger 1977) And tothis extent then globalization acquires aphilosophical status that requires a phenom-enological analysis (Jameson 1998)

In the following I would like to describewhat I take to be fundamental elements of aphenomenology of globalization I discussfour points of departure for a phenomenol-ogy of globalization from the perspective ofthose most adversely affected by the impactsand transformations unleashed by global-ization It is also clear that they betray aWestern perspective although one which isconscious of the privilege and narrownessthat underwrites and supports it

First any phenomenology of globalizationwill have to begin with the descriptionanalysis and study of the exponential accel-eration of the production and disseminationof information Of course information is notknowledge Knowledge might be broadlydefined as ldquoa set of organized statements offacts or ideas presenting a reasoned judg-ment or an experimental result which istransmitted to others through some commu-nication medium rdquo (see Castells 1996 Vol1 p 17 n 27) Information on the other

hand presupposes knowledge and dataMore precisely information is the commu-nication of knowledge and data in such away that the latter has to be discriminatedfrom the former Data are made up of rawstatements and experimental results withoutthe reasoned judgment No one will deny theleaps in knowledge acquisition and informa-tion transmission that have taken place overthe last 50 years since the atom bomb wasfirst invented and exploded over desert atLos Alamos It is this glaring transformationof our knowledge of the world ourselves andthe cosmos in general that has incited someto call this the ldquoinformation agerdquo

If we follow Karl Jaspers as well asPierre Chaunu and Ferdinand Braudel wemight suggest that every major epochaltransformation in human consciousness wascatalysed by transformations in the meansof acquisition of knowledge and its com-munication through different media ortools of information The axial period ofwhich Jaspers spoke in his work on TheOrigin and Goal of History which tookplace between the 6th and 2nd centuriesbefore Christ had to do with the inventionof books the development of major citiesand the expansion of networks of economicexchange in terms of trade routes (Jaspers1953) At this time however paper andbooks were fragile expensive and to a largeextent tools of luxury and privilegeKnowledge of the world was guided bymythological world-views which were con-trolled by almost unassailable authoritiesThe 16th century another axial age wasmarked by the printing revolution inaugu-rated by Gutenberg the establishment ofnew trade routes and the secularization ofknowledge production and distributionwith the emergence of philosophers andintellectuals

The 20th century has marked yet anothershift in the way we produce and distributeknowledge and disseminate it as informa-tion One of the greatest unsung and neglec-ted triumphs of the 20th century has beenthe institutionalization of mass education

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 13

Many have been the horrors that havevisited cultures through their encounterwith the nation-state but one of the clearbenefits of this encounter has been thedevelopment of mass literacy and the estab-lishment of education institutions that are ifnot de facto at least nominally open to allcitizens of the state Talcott Parsons calledthis achievement of the nation-state theeducational revolution Amartya Sen forinstance has urged us to measure absolutepoverty in terms of the years of schoolingalong with access to potable water qualityof air and access to minimally nutritiousfood (Sen 1999) But this is only the leastnoticeable although perhaps the mostimportant aspect of the information revolu-tion of the 20th century The most notice-able is of course the computer and tele-communications revolutions Jeremy Rifkinhas appropriately suggested that we talk interms of the ldquobio-tech centuryrdquo and that weunderstand that the genetic computer andtelecommunications revolutions are differ-ent flanks of one same front the informa-tion revolution (Rifkin 1998) DNA wasdiscovered by Watson and Crick in 1953 in1990 the USA launched the Genome proj-ect by the turn of the third millennium theentire human genome plus the genetic makeup of the most important foods will becontrolled by a few multinationals (Daw-kins 1997) In the USA already over 25of the grain produced is genetically engi-neered Presently one of the most impor-tant conflicts between the USA and Europesince the deployment of missiles throughoutWestern Europe during the 1960s and 1980sis brewing over the import of geneticallyaltered produce and meats You might wantto call this bio-tech imperialism but youmay also call it the carrying out to itslogical conclusion of the ldquoagricultural revo-lutionrdquo (Shiva 1991 1997 1999) Similarlythe computer was invented during the1940s but only began to be mass producedin the 1970s Today any laptop has morecomputational power than all of the com-puters of the first generation put together

Micro-chips are superseded every 18months with each new cycle increasingexponentially the speed memory and con-centration of micro-processors In 1957 theRussians launched Sputnik the first artificialsatellite the Americans followed in 1962with the launching of Telstar 1 the firsttelevision satellite Today there are morethan 200 satellites forming a canopy ofelectric nodes linking the world in a net ofsynchronous telecommunications It is pro-jected that by the first decade of the nextmillennium there will be more than 300satellites (National Geographic 1999)

One of the fundamental characteristics ofthe modern world is that the extraction ofraw materials and their transformation intocommodities has been demoted from itsplace of privilige in bourgeois capitalism bythe production of scientific knowledge andits dissemination as information This is whatthe information revolution amounts tonamely the superseding of the industrialrevolution by the transformation both in themeans and object of production (Baudrillard1981 Lash and Urry 1994 Lowe 1995)Today what matters is not the raw materialand the possession of the means of produc-tion instead what matters is the knowledgethat allows one to discover even invent rawmaterials which are processed through ever-changing means of production The clearestexample of this is the bio-tech industrywhere Monsanto is the perfect illustration ofthe supervening of raw materials and meansof production by the production of knowl-edge that controls seeds and how they areprocessed (Lappe and Bailey 1998 Rifkin1998)

Second the acceleration of the productionand information dissemination has had adirect and evident impact on the way wethink about history and tradition The dura-bility and unifying role of our world-viewsor images of the world is a function of therelationship between our individual bodilyexperience of space and time and the way theworld surrounding us itself undergoeschange The world around us in turn is

14 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

made up of the social world and the naturalworld Each one has its own rhythms andtime (Kubler 1962 Elias 1992 Heidegger1992 Benford 1999) In light of this weshould speak of a biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time (Wal-lerstein 1991) Biomorphic space-time is theway space and time are experienced by theindividual The clock that measures thisspace-time might be said to be the biologicalclock of each human being Social space-timeis what social groups societies communitieslive and experience This space-time is meas-ured in generations historical processesevents the rise and fall of cities The motor ofthis space-time is the level of socio-technicaldevelopment of a society its infra-structuresand super-structures World space-time is thepace at which the natural world evolves andtransforms seasons come and go rivers runand dry up mountains erode plains dry upand become deserts and forests are cut downand grow up or turn into shrubbery andwasteland The further back we look in thehistory of humanity the more disjointed andseparate were the rhythms at which thesedifferent clocks ran and operated

Today there is a convergence of the speedsof these different space-times If we comparethe speed of world space-time and bio-morphic space-time we find that they arerunning almost simultaneously In otherwords the more our own life-spans arelengthened and world space-time the timeor speed at which the world itself changesshrinks the more unstable and local are ourworld-views or images of the world Cosmo-logical views as well as abstract universalitywere able to be sustained as long as the worlddid not seem not to change and humans hadsuch short life-spans that any substantivechange in the world was not noticeable andexperienceable by any two or three genera-tions Pierre Chaunu (1974) remarked thatone of the fundamental elements in thepossibility for the communication of knowl-edge was the lengthening of the life-spans ofhumans during and after the 16th centuryToday we have the convergence of unprece-

dented human life-spans (to the extent thatsome societies are registering the divergentvectors of the general ageing of their popula-tions and the lowering of infant mortalitywhere both are clearly a function of theimprovement in general medicine and itshaving been made more broadly available)with unprecedentedly accelerated worldchanges The latter is not simply a meremirage occasioned by almost synchronousworld communication It is the case that weare changing the face of the planet in waysthat not just generations but individuals areable to note and distinctly remember In thisway we can talk about the malleability oftradition and the arbitrariness of history Inother words what Harvey and Giddenscalled respectively the compression and col-lapse of space-time manifests itself in thecontemporary plurification of historicalmethodologies and re-narrativation of histo-ries as well as the skepticism that anyhistorical chronology is not a function ofsome ideological agenda Historical revisionhas become the daily bread of the historicallycynical masses of peoples who cannot read inhistory the telos of either emancipation orrationality In the age of globalization reasondoes not entail freedom nor revolution free-dom nor reason revolution In this way wecan say with Heelas Lash and Morris that welive in an post-traditional or de-tradition-alized world in which these notations thatgave cohesion and direction to the project ofmodernity have been superseded or ren-dered ideological and historicized (Heelas etal 1996)

Third any phenomenology of globaliza-tion must also begin with what I take to be anequally momentous transformation ofhuman societies and this has to do with themega-urbanization of the world We can saythat for most of its history most of humanityhas been rural Cities developed as append-ages to large agricultural areas Cities werefunctional principles of rural areas Even-tually this relationship reversed but onlyafter the city ceased to be a communicationnode for agricultural exchange Cities started

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 15

to acquire their independence when theycould produce their own commoditiesnamely knowledge and political power Thisonly began to happen after the Renaissancewhen major cities were not just ports but alsocentres of learning culture and politicalpower (Hall 1998) This trend howeveronly takes off when industrialization allowscities to become their own productive cen-tres even if they still remain tied to ruralcentres The reversal of the relationshipbetween rural and urban areas howeverbegan to shift in the 1950s during these yearsalready 30 of all humanity lived in citiesThe United Nations projects that by the year2005 50 of humanity will live in citiesHere we must pause and reflect that thismeans that a substantive part of humanitywill still remain rural and that most of thoselsquofarmersrsquo and lsquopeasantsrsquo will be in so-calledThird World countries Nonetheless as EricHobsbawn remarked in his work The Age ofExtremes the ldquomost dramatic and far-reach-ing social change of the second half of the[the twentieth century] is the death of thepeasantryrdquo (Hobsbawn 1994 p 289) Theother side of this reversal of the relationshipbetween city and country is that most mega-cities will be in what is called the ThirdWorld By the third millennium the 10 mostpopulated metropolises of the World will beneither in Europe nor in the USA

These trends can be attributed to a varietyof factors The most important factor in theelimination of the rural is the industrializa-tion of agriculture a process that reached itszenith with the so-called ldquogreen revolutionrdquoof the 1950s and 1960s Under the industrial-ization of agriculture we must understandnot just the introduction of better tools butthe homogenization of agricultural produc-tion by which I mean the introduction on aglobal scale of the mono-cultivo (Shiva1993) We must also include here the elimina-tion of self-subsistent forms of farmingthrough the elimination of self-renewing bio-diverse eco-systems One of the most effec-tive ways however in which the city hasimposed itself over the countryside is

through the projection of images that desta-bilized the sense of tradition and culturalcontinuity so fundamental to the rhythms ofthe countryside Through television radioand now the internet the city assaults thefabric of the countryside Tradition is under-mined by the promises and riches projectedby the tube of plenty the cornucopia of otherpossibilities the television and its world ofinfo-tainment (see Baumanrsquos wonderful dis-cussion of how under the globalization ofentertainment the Benthamian Panopticonturns into the MacWorldInfotainment Syn-opticon (1998a pp 53ndash54))

Indeed one of the most characteristicaspects of globalization is what is called thedecreasing importance of the local the statethe national We therefore need to speakwith Jurgen Habermas and Paul Kennedy ofa post-national constellation in which sover-eign nation-states as territorially localizedhave become less important less in controlof their own spatiality (Kennedy 1993Habermas 2001) But what is forgotten isthat there is a simultaneous process oflocalization in which place acquires a newsignificance certain spaces of course (Feath-erstone 1995) The city is the site at whichthe forces of the local and the global meetthe site where the forces of transnationalfinance capital and the local labour marketsand national infra-structures enter into con-flict and contestation over the city AsSaskia Sassen writes

ldquoThe city has indeed emerged as a site fornew claims by global capital which uses thecity as an lsquoorganizational commodityrsquo butalso by disadvantage sectors of the urbanpopulation which in large cities arefrequently as internationalized a presence asis capital The denationalizing of urbanspace and the formation of new claims bytransnational actors and involvingcontestation raise the questionmdashwhose cityis itrdquo (Sassen 1998 p xx)

The city in fact has become the crossroadfor new denationalizing politics in whichglobal actors capitals and moving peoples

16 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

enter into conflict across a transnationalurban system

Habermas has noted with acuity that oneof the characteristics of the 18th and 19thcenturies was their pronounced fears of theldquomassrdquo ldquothe crowdrdquo (Habermas 2001 p39) Such fears were summarized in the titleof the prescient work by Ortega y GassetThe Revolt of the Masses (1985) As wasnoted already the 18th and the 19th centuriessignalled the reversal of the relationshipbetween countryside and city This reversalmeant the rapid urbanization and demo-graphic explosion in cities which accompanythe rapid industrialization of certain metro-polises of the West London Berlin NewYork Chicago Newark Mexico City PortoAlegre and the non-West New DehliTokyo Beijing Cairo etc Urbanization andIndustrialization gave rise to the spectre ofthe irascible insatiable uncontrollable massthat would raze everything in its path Threeclassical responses emerged Sorel and thecelebration of the creative power of anar-chical and explosive unorganized mass mobi-lization the Marxist-Leninist and theattempt to domesticate and train the creativeand transformative power of social unrestthrough the development of a party machin-ery that would guide the ire and discontentof gathered masses of unemployed andemployed workers and the conservative andreactionary response of an Edmund Burkebut which is also echoed in the works ofphilosophers like Heidegger which dis-dained and vilified the common folk themass in a simple term Das Man The crowdthe mass is consumed and distracted byprattle and curiosity as it wallows in themiasma of inauthenticity and cowardness(Fritsche 1999)

Today such attitudes seem not just foreignbut also unrealistic Most of our experience isdetermined by a continuous mingling withcrowds and large undifferentiated masses ofpeople We get on the road and we areconfronted with traffic jams we get on thesubway and people accost and touch us fromall directions We live in continuous friction

with the stranger the other May we suggestthat the ldquoOtherrdquo has become such an impor-tant point of departure for philosophicalreflection precisely because we exist in such acontinuous propinquity with it Indeed theOther is no longer simply a phantasmagor-ical presence projected and barely discern-ible beyond the boundaries of the ecumenethe polis and the frontiers of the nation-stateAt the same time the discourse about theldquootherrdquo what is called the politics of alteritymarks a shift from the negative discourse ofanxiety and fear epitomized in the termldquoanomierdquo so well diagnosed by DurkheimSimmel and Freud and so aptly described byChristopher Lasch (1979) to the positivediscourse of solidarity inclusion acceptancetolerance citizenship and justice so welldiagnosed and described by Zymunt Bauman(1998b) Ulrich Beck (1997) Anthony Gid-dens (1990) and Jurgen Habermas (2001)

Are there any morals to be extracted fromthis profound transformation in the wayhumanity in general understands itself Forthe longest period of the history of human-kind groups remained both sheltered fromand inured to otherness by the solidity andstability of their traditions and their worldsCultures remained fairly segregated maps ofthe world in which the foreign strange andunknown was relegated beyond the bound-aries of the controllable and surveyable Tothis extent lsquoothernessrsquo was legislated over byreligion the state nature and even historynamely those centres of gravity of cultureand images of the world In an age in whichall traditions are under constant revision andhuman temporality converges with the age ofthe world itself then lsquoothernessrsquo appearsbefore us as naked unmediated otherness weare all others before each other In otherwords neither our sense of identity nor thesense of difference of the other are given apriori they are always discovered consti-tuted and dismantled in the very processes ofencounter The other was always constitutedfor us by extrinsic forces Now the other isconstituted in the very process of our iden-tity formation but in a contingent fashion

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 17

We make others as we make ourselves Thisreflection links up with some insights thatEnrique Dussel has had with respect to therelationship between the emergence of citiesand the development of the first codes ofethics the Hammurabi Code and the BookN of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Dussel1998) Such codes arose precisely becauseindividuals were thrown into the proximityof each other and were thus confronted witheach otherrsquos vulnerability and injurabilityThe injuction to take care of the poor theindigent the orphan the widow the invalidcould only arise out of the urban experienceof the contiguity with the injurable flesh ofthe stranger Today the experience of theindigent other is of the immigrant the exiledthe refugee who build their enclaves in theshadows of the glamorous city of transna-tional capital (King 1990 Sassen 1999) Forthis reason the other and the immigrant areinterchangeable but this also raises the issueof the new global city as a space for therepresentation and formation of post-colo-nial identities Geo-cities are spaces for thereconfiguration of image the imaginationand the imaginary as Arjun Appaduraiargued (1996) In this sense the centrality ofthe urban experience for humanity meansthat otherness is not going to be a meremetaphysical or even phenomenological cat-egory and concern Under the reign of thecity Otherness has become quotidian andpractical

Fourth another fundamental point ofdeparture for a phenomenology of global-ization will have to be the analysis of theplace of technology in our everyday lives Iwould like to understand technology in twosenses First in its broadest sense as ldquothe useof scientific knowledge to specify ways ofdoing things in a reproducible wayrdquo (Bell1976 p 29) Second as a prosthesis of thehuman body Technology to paraphrase awonderful aphorism of William Burroughsis the mind wanting more body I will discussfirst the former sense of technology as ascientific specification for the iterable way ofdoing things In this sense then a hospital is

a social technology like agriculture and cattleraising are material technologies By the sametoken prisons asylums and ghettos are socialtechnologies There is however somethingunique about technology in the 20th centuryand that is that technology itself has becomean object of technology in other words theuse of science in order to produce ever moreefficient ways of doing things in ever morereproducible ways itself has become a tech-nological quest This technology of technol-ogy is what one might call the institutional-ization of invention Alfred NorthWhitehead noted that ldquothe greatest inventionof the 19th century was the invention of themethod of inventionrdquo (Whitehead 1925 p141) What Whitehead attributes to the 19thcentury reached its true apogee in the secondhalf of the 20th century with the institu-tionalization of the research universityWhile the programme of the research uni-versity goes back to the German ideal of theuniversity it is in the USA that this ideagained its highest formalization and statesupport Without question we have to attrib-ute the greatest technological breakthroughsof the 20th century to this unique con-vergence of the state the military and theresearch university what Eisenhower calledthe militaryndashindustrial complex and whatwe now with hindsight should more appro-priately call the militaryndashuniversityndashindus-trial complex (Kenney 1986 Aronowitz2000)

The rise of the nation-state also signifiedthe rise of state-sponsored education and thestate university The university plays a dualrole On the one hand it has the function ofpreparing citizens and workers for the mate-rial and cultural-political self-reproductionof society On the other it has the role ofinstitutionalizing scientific investigation theinvention of invention Through the uni-versity the state invests in its future ability totransform its material technologies of self-reproduction Winning Nobel prizes is notjust a matter of pride it is above all aquestion of institutional power to supportimmense research budgets whose actual

18 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

industrial and technical application might befar off into the future This is one of thereasons why the USA has remained a worldpower despite its apparent military stale-mate namely because it still remains thecentre for the production of most techno-logical innovation

Related to the invention of invention whatI called the institutionalization of the tech-nology of technology as its other side is theinterpenetration of technology in everyaspect of our lives Even those who are notdirectly affected by technological revolutionsin their daily life are nonetheless indirectlyaffected insofar as their worlds economiesand cultures are made vulnerable to take-overs and colonization by those who drivethe technological revolutions of today Forthe longest period of the history of humanitytechnology remained distant from the livesand bodies of men and women not because itdid not impact them but because it did sosporadically and in such tangential ways firethe wheel the printing press the metalplough the steam engine the automobileEach technological innovation however hasmeant a further interpenetration betweentool and human body With this I turn to thediscussion of technology as prosthesis thesecond sense of technology I want to con-sider in light of a phenomenology ofglobalization

A technology is a way of doing things inways that can be reproduced again andagain and that therefore can be taught andpassed on Culture is in this sense the mostcomplex and important technology of all Inthis sense a technology is a way for asociety to extend itself across time fromgeneration to generation century to century(Giddens 1984 1987) A technology gen-erally instantiated itself in tools Tools allowparticular individuals to reach beyond theboundaries of their own bodies A tool is anextension of a particular bodily organ thataugments its original performance Tool andbody however have remained relatively dis-tinct even if one can claim that the hand isa product of our invention of tools

(Rothenberg 1993) Recognition of the dis-tinctness between tool and body does notentail the negation of their dialectical inter-dependence and co-modification Their dis-tinctness was sustained by what I havealready referred to above as the temporalityof humans and the time of the world Whenthe time of humans and the world convergewhat mediates their encounter tools hasalready fused with the body or has alreadymade the world immediate Our experienceof the world is already so mediated by ourtechnological tools that we cannot distin-guish the world from the tool and thesefrom the body We are our tools We are ourtechnological prosthesis because they arethe world (Brahm and Driscoll 1995) Butthis does not mean that technology is itselftransparent Rather technology itself hasbecome like our bodies in the sense that wedo not know how our livers hearts orbrains work we just assume that they willdo what they were designed to do and ifthey break down then we go to aspecialist

Everywhere we are surrounded by techno-logical devices which have insinuated them-selves in our lives and without which wecannot do the watch the telephone the carthe television but also toothpaste X-raysvaccines birth control pills condoms sunscreen eye-glasses shavers purified andchlorinated water and so on

What I am talking about can be illustratedby comparing Mary Shelleyrsquos Frankensteinin which a creation out of human partsbecomes monstrous precisely because itentails the complete instrumentalization ofour bodies and thus a sacrilage of its allegeddivine naturalness and Donna Harawayrsquosborgs which demonstrate and theorize towhat extent we are always already synthetic(Haraway 1991) There is no nature outsidethe confines of the laboratory Resistance isfutile to the logic of technology because weare all already borg we are products of ourtechnologies and nature exists only as anArcadian fantasy This reading should not betaken to be suggesting that nature does not

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 19

exist in the sense that it is a fiction the mirageof radical social constructivism Rather thepoint is to highlight the ways in which natureis to be thought of in terms of what today wecall the lsquorecursive loopsrsquo between technologyand nature in which nature is already anlsquoartefactrsquo and lsquomachinesrsquo are natural (Hayles1999) Indeed appropriating Marxrsquos languagefrom his 1844 manuscripts we have to talkabout the humanization of machines and themechanization of humanity

Is there a moral to be extracted by theinterpenetration of humans and their techno-logical prosthesis to the point that youcannot distinguish them any longer I wouldsay that a Heideggerian response to thisquestion is anachronistic and indefensibleOn the other hand a dia-mat in the sense ofEngelsrsquos dialectical materialism will not doeither Science is neither metaphysically badnor a malleable ideological epiphenomenonAgainst these two positions I would advo-cate what has been called Kranzbergrsquos lawwhich reads ldquotechnology is neither good norbad nor is it neutralrdquo (Castells 1996 Vol 1p 65)

I would like to summarize my reflectionsby suggesting that once a phenomenology ofglobalization takes seriously the points ofdeparture discussed above we will discoverthat globalization might stand for anotheraxial period This new axial age will becharacterized by at least these four themesfirst the perpetual revolutionizing of pro-duction technologies has turned into thetechnology of innovation in such a way thatthe generation of capital is relocated to theproduction of new information technologiesand not production and processing of rawmaterials Second because of the almostinstantaneous information transmission andreception across the world and the con-vergence of natural historical and personaltemporalities we have the effect of the de-transcendentalization and temporalization oftradition These de-transcendentalizationsand temporalizations suggest that our imagesof the world will be at the reach of our owndesign In this sense we will be able to speak

of the true secularization of the world and itscomplete humanization Third is the routini-zation and de-metaphysicalization of other-ness brought about by the hyper-urbaniza-tion of humanity Otherness will become aproduct of society and in this sense we willhave to talk of regimes of alterization Thelsquootherrsquo then will become a continuouspresence that will require our constant con-cern and vigilance Fourth is the dissolutionof the boundary between natural and syn-thetic body and tool technology and natureWe will have to speak then of the age inwhich humans have become their own crea-tions and in which the directions of thereproduction of both mind and body cultureand technology will become a concern ofpolitical practice of paramount importance

The image of the world projected byglobalization is one which collapses thedifferences between biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time whatwe see is what we get To put it in thelanguage of an essay by Theodor Adorno thehistory of nature is no different from thehistory of humanity (Adorno 1984) Global-ization also projects an image of the world inwhich otherness is not external and intract-able but produced from within Finallyglobalization is an image of the world inwhich the natural and the social the createdand uncreated have been brought togetherunder the insight that we have been produc-ing ourselves as we have been producingtools to alter the world Now however theproducing of our tools is not different fromthe production of ourselves and our worldIn the image of the world projected byglobalization the world is humanity lookingat itself through its eyes and not the eyes ofa god history or nature

III City of angels

ldquoWho is the observer when it concerns thequestion about the function of religion thesystem of religion itself or science as anexternal observerrdquo (Luhmann 2000 p 118)

20 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

The kind of phenomenology of globalizationthat I sketched above allows us to ask aboutthe kinds of challenges religion faces in anage of globalization For religion appears as aresource of images concepts traditions andpractices that can allow individuals andcommunities to deal with a world that ischanging around them by the hour (Robert-son and Garrett 1991 Luhmann 2000) Inthe new Unubersichtlichkeit [unsurveyabil-ity] of our global society religion appears ascompendium of intuitions that have not beenextinguished by the so-called process ofsecularization (Mendieta forthcoming a)Most importantly however religion cannotbe dismissed or derided because it is theprivileged if not the primary form in whichthe impoverished masses of the invisiblecities of the world (those cities to which Ipointed in the first part of this essay)articulate their hopes as well as critique theirworld

The first challenge to religion that ourphenomenology of globalization allow us toarticulate has to do with the lsquode-transcenden-talizing of othernessrsquo or what I also wouldlike to call the lsquoroutinization of othernessrsquoThere is a correlation between the wayhumanity has conceptualized otherness met-aphysically and conceptually on the onehand and humanityrsquos relationship to real andconcrete otherness as it has been experiencedexistentially and phenomenologically on theother hand This correlation has been medi-ated by humanityrsquos decreasing ruralism Inother words the less rural and thus the moreurban dwelling humans have become theless other is the otherness that we can thinkof or dream up The suggestion is that themetaphysics of alterity that has guided somuch of Western theology and religiousthinking over the last 2000 years has beendetermined by a particular asymmetrybetween the country and the city For thelongest history of humanity most societieshave been farming and rural-dwelling com-munities and associations Contact betweenextremely different communities and societ-ies was sporadic and rare and when contact

did occurred this was meditated by citydwellers and the long memory of popularmythologies But as was noted above in thedawning 21st century most humans will becity dwellers Furthermore In the 21st cen-tury most humanity will be conglomerated inthe mega-urbes of the Third World Underthis circumstance the holy other the abso-lutely other will be deflated Alterity and theextraordinary what can also be called thetremendum are de-mystified and de-met-aphysicalized (Habermas 1992 Placher1996) Either everyone will be a stranger orno one will be because we will all bestrangers in a city of strangers In such asituation otherness will have become a rou-tine an un-extra-ordinary event How thenare we to think divine alterity the othernessof the holy in a situation in which onto-logically and metaphysically all alterity hasbeen deflated demoted rendered normallevelled to the cotidian Are we in a situationof having to ldquorisk a new idea of holinessrdquo asBarry Taylor Pastor at the Sanctuary Churchin Santa Monica put it This would have tobe a holiness which is not other worldly buta holiness which is about the difference anduniqueness of others those who are oureveryday other with whom we ride thesubway with whom we walk the streets ofpopulated mega-urbes of the new age withwhom we share in anonymity the crowdedspaces of the new cities The real andmetaphorical wilderness of the world of itsjungles and forests of its undiscovered con-tinents and untamed seas of its unmappeddeserts and unnavigated rivers were excusesas well instigations to go searching for godbeyond the familial the urbane the too closeand already lsquodomesticatedrsquo God was beyondthe world other than the world Now thequestion is how do we discover the other inthe mundane difference of every fellowhuman being and the crowded city ofstrangers

The second challenge has to do with thecity as locus of the culture of consumptionas the site for an ethos of immediacyhedonism and hyper-excitation Sassen

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 21

speaks of the city as the crossroads of aconfrontation between the flows of capitaland the flows of peoples One of the waysthese flows clash in cities is through theconfrontation between cultures that isbetween different modalities of life Themore people become urban dwellers themore people are exposed to the cornucopiaof cultural possibilities It is not just thatmore people are in cities it is also that morepeople are seeking to participate in thestandards of life promised by urban dwellingThe challenges are unprecedented We arepresently choking in our own refuse in ourown garbage The psychological toil mustalso be unprecedented The level of unmetexpectations unfilled desires the gapbetween universally promised but exorbi-tantly expensive commodities that shatteredself-images and worth and that are availableto a relatively small fraction of the worldpopulation has grown exponentially Thereis another underside to the city as thecrossroads of the clash of modalities of lifeThe more cities grow the more they exerttheir pull on the so-called hinterland therural areas The more agriculture is mecha-nized and industrialized the more we adoptbiotechnology the more superfluous ldquofarm-ersrdquo become At the same time the expansionof telecommunications television and paidfor television and satellite connections havemade it easier to link up and peer into theldquotube of plentyrdquo to use that wonderfulphrase by Erik Barnouw (1990 [1975]) Thecity literally and metaphorically consumes itshinterland its outlying areas of supply itconsumes its resources and produce but alsoits cultures and its peoples

It is perhaps unnecessary to underscoreagain that most of the consumption of ruralresources is taking place in the metropolisesof the so-called First World So not onlymust we address the rampant and rapaciousconsumerism of cities in general but also theparticularly scandalous and grotesque asym-metry between the consumption of FirstWorld cities and Third World cities Thisissue becomes particularly pressing when in

the so-called advanced nations of the worldwe have thinkers intellectuals and criticstalking about a politics and culture of inclu-sion and tolerance (Habermas 1998) Thispolitics of inclusion is articulated with thebest intentions in mind The assumptionguiding it is that people throughout theworld would be better if they could partici-pate more equitably in the same kinds of so-called basic needs and luxuries that wewesterners enjoy But there is somethingprofoundly disingenuous and deleteriouslynaotildeve about such a view In some cases thepoverty of those across the world to whomwe would like to extend our standard ofliving is due precisely to our luxury Thatwhich we want to share is the cause of theprivation we want to alleviate Thus perhapsthe agenda should not be one of inclusionbut of dismantling the system that occa-sioned in the first place the exclusions webenefited and continue to benefit from

In this situation then the challengebecomes how to think of an urban culture offrugality The challenge is how to translatethe religious message and teaching of povertyas a holy way as a holy calling into a secularvalue a secular calling Another way ofputting it would be how do we translate thevisions of the desert fathers St Francis ofAssisi Mohandas Gandhi into an urbanvision for a spiritually starving youth Oralternatively if we think of what ArnoldToynbee and Eric Hobsbawn said about the20th century namely that its greatestachievement was the expansion of the middleclass then the goal for the 21st centuryshould be the expansion of a globalizedldquoliving level classrdquo In other words we haveto develop a culture for which the greatestachievement is not that everyone else will livelike us but that we will live at the level thatallows the most people to share in the mostfundamental goods potable water clean airinfant nutrition to sustain healthy standardsof unstunted growth and the possibility ofbasic education Here I would have to saythat I concur with Hardt and Negri on theircanonization of Assisi as a saint in the

22 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

hagiography of revolutionary militancy(2000 p 413)

The third challenge that our phenomenol-ogy of globalization allows us to elucidate hasto do with one of its central locus of analysisnamely the city If cities have become the siteswhere the unbundling of the state takes placethat is if we take cities to be the sites for thede-nationalizing of the national and if we atthe same time take the city as the locus of anemergent juridification or process of legal-ization of new forms of relationships then arewe not in need of having to re-think therelationship between the legal and politicalstructures of the emergent supra-nationalstate and the para- or extra-statist ldquochurchrdquoAnother way of putting it would be to notethat the church at least in the West antecedesthe modern nation-state In fact the churchwas the state and that partly because of thisthe quest for modernity the process ofmodernization entailed a secularization ofstate and legal structures In the process thechurchrsquos sphere of operation becamerestricted or constrained by the spaces drawnby the boundaries of nation-states Churchesand denominations became identified withnational boundaries which took place not-withstanding the underlying and fundamentaluniversalist thrust of Christianity If weaccept Sassenrsquos analysis which we must giventhe overwhelming evidence then we areinescapably put in the situation of having tore-think the relationship between the churchand the state In fact as the nation-states of the19th and 20th century are unbundled andnew forms of political and legal rights emergein de-territorialized and de-nationalizedforms of political self-determination then thechurch itself will have to face its de-national-ization and de-territorialization At the sametime however one of the fundamental condi-tions of the presence of the church in the 21stcentury will have to be that it must havelearned the lessons of the last 500 years ofcolonialism imperialism and post-colonial-ism This means that the challenge is dual Onthe one hand the new church must find aplace beyond the nation-states of political

modernity but on the other hand it must doso with a post-colonialist and post-imperialistattitude In the age of global transformationsthe new church cannot and will not be able toserve as an agent of globalization for the newimperial masters that began to profile them-selves in the horizon namely a united front ofEuropean nations (an expanded NATO) atechnological elite bent on re-designingnature and a cosmopolitan nobility withoutcontrols allegiances or consciences

Fourth and finally I think that anotherextremely important challenge has to do withthe insight that cities are the places wherecultures come to cultivate each other Inother words cities are the places where oldcultures are cannibalized but also carniv-alized where old cultures which are dyingcome to be renewed but also where newcultures are produced from the remains ofold ones (Hamacher 1997) Cities are germi-nals of new cultures Indeed just as we arevery likely to find micro-climates in mostglobal cities we are likely to find culturalenclaves little Italys Chinatowns Japan-towns little Bombays etc These places arewhere the centripetal and centrifugal forcesof homogenization and heterogenizationinteract to produce new cultural formationsUnderlying this new cultural genesis is itsevident and almost presentist character Theprocesses of cultural genesis take place rightin front of our eyes Cultures are notmillennial sedimentations and even thatwhich is peddled as the oldest is a present-day version of the old Most importantlycultures have become something we produceand choose cultures are something which weeither nurture and preserve or abandon anddisavow In all of these cases we are notpassive but active agents of transformationIn this situation the challenge for the newchurch for an urban ministry for the 21stcentury is how to develop an ecclesiology ofcultural diversity How will the new churchparticipate in this cultural genesis that isgerminating in global cities while retaining asense of identity Or conversely how will itretain a sense of cultural identity without

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 23

becoming either ethnocentric or jingoisticabout its cultural bequest without contribut-ing to the ossification of its own culture Onwhat terms can the new church participate inthe creation of new cultures and the preser-vation of successful ones

Conclusion

Cities are the vortex of the convergence ofthe processes of globalization and local-ization Cities are epitomes of glocalizationto use Robertsonrsquos language (1994) They arealso sites of the sedimentation of history Inthis essay I have sough to advance theresearch agenda that would take the ldquoinvisi-ble citiesrdquo of the so-called Third World astheir primary object of analysis At the sametime however I have urged that we look atthe cities in the developed industrializedworld through the eyes of their invisibleinhabitants and citizens immigrants ethnicminorities disenfranchised groups workerswomen and the youth There are invisiblecities within the cities that are so visible inmost urban theory and analysis as well asinvisible cities that remain unseen becausethey are not on the horizon of the academicagendas of researchers in the universities ofthe developed world

In tandem I have suspended judgementon whether to be for or against global-ization not because I do not think that wecan make moral judgments in this case butbecause I think we need to broaden ouranalyses of this new order of things Ideveloped some general points of departurefor a phenomenological analysis of global-ization This particular approach I thinkexhibits how ldquoglobalizationrdquo can and oughtto become a matter for serious philosophicalreflection I have identified the issues ofalterity temporality tradition the distinc-tion between the natural and the syntheticas philosophemes that are substantivelyimpacted by the processes of globalizationYet the phenomenological approach Iarticulate is deliberate in assuming a partic-

ular perspective or angle of approach I havesought to delineate a phenomenology ofglobalization from below The world doesnot disclose itself in the same way to allsubjects much less globalization Thus thephenomenology here presented urges us tolook at the world from below from theperspective of those who seem to be moreadversely than beneficially affected by theprocesses that make up globalization

This is what the ldquobelowrdquo in the subtitle ofthe essay pointed to the below of the poorand destitute the below of those who are notseen and do not register in the radar of socialtheory Furthermore I have tried to furtherqualify that perspective from below byfocusing my attention on the issue of reli-gion Religion clearly can mean manythings but at the very least it means ldquothe sighof the oppressedrdquo and the ldquoencyclopediccompendiumrdquo of a heartless world as Marxput it (1994 p 28) if only because it is theform in which the destitute the most vulner-able in our world express their critiques aswell as hopes I have argued that we ought tolook at cities as germinals of new culturesand that if we want to trace the emergentcultures of those ldquobelowrdquo then we betterlook at religious movements In what waysare the religious language of the oppressedand disenfranchised of the invisible cities ofglobalization critiques and resistances toglobalization This is clearly a researchdesideratum rather than a description oreven assessment

Note

1 I want to thank Bob Catterall for encouraging me towrite this article and for his comments on earlyversions of it I also want to thank Lois AnnLorentzen and Nelson Maldonado Torres who readit with great care and made substantive suggestionscorrections and criticisms that have made meunderstand better my own project I also want tothank Enrique Dussel Jurgen Habermas WalterMignolo and Santiago Castro-Gomez with whom Ihave discussed many of the ideas here developedand who have given me impetus to continue alongthis line with their own pioneering works

24 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Bibliography

Adorno TW (1984) lsquoThe idea of natural historyrsquo Telos60 pp 31ndash42

Amin S (1996) Capitalism in the Age of GlobalizationThe Management of Contemporary Society Londonand New York Zed Books

Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large CulturalDimensions of Globalization MinneapolisUniversity of Minnesota Press

Appiah KA (1992) In My Fatherrsquos House Africa in thePhilosophy of Culture New York Oxford UniversityPress

Aronowitz S (2000) The Knowledge FactoryDismantling the Corporate University and CreatingTrue Higher Learning Boston Beacon Press

Barber BR (1995) Jihad vs McWorld How Globalismand Tribalism are Reshaping the World New YorkBallantine Books

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1993) lsquoA globalizingeconomy some implications and consequencesrsquo inB Mazlish and R Buultjens (eds) ConceptualizingGlobal History pp 153ndash172 Boulder COWestview Press

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1994) Global DreamsImperial Corporations and the New World OrderNew York Simon amp Schuster

Barnouw E (1990 [1975]) Tube of Plenty TheEvolution of American Television New YorkOxford University Press

Baudrillard J (1981) For a Critique of the PoliticalEconomy of the Sign St Louis MO Telos Press

Bauman Z (1998a) Globalization The HumanConsequences New York Columbia UniversityPress

Bauman Z (1998b) lsquoPostmodern religionrsquo in P Heelas(ed) Religion Modernity and PostmodernityCambridge Blackwell

Beck U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung Frankfurt amMain Suhrkamp

Bell D (1976) The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism New York Basic Books

Benford G (1999) Deep Time How HumanityCommunicates Across Millenia New York AvonBooks Inc

Beyer P (1994) Religion and Globalization LondonSage

Brahm Jr G and Driscoll M (eds) (1995) ProstheticTerritories Politics and Hypertechnologies BoulderCO Westview

Bretherton C and Ponton G (eds) (1996) GlobalPolitics An Introduction Cambridge Blackwell

Calvino I (1974) Invisible Cities New York HarcourtBrace Jovanovich

Casanova J (1994) Public Religions in the ModernWorld Chicago University of Chicago Press

Castells M (1996ndash8) The Information Age EconomySociety and Culture Vol 1 The Rise of the

Network Society Vol 2 The Power of Identity Vol3 End of Millenium Malden MA and OxfordBlackwell Publishers

Chaunu P (1974) Historie science sociale la dureelrsquoespace et lrsquohomme a lrsquoepoque moderne ParisSociete drsquoedition drsquoenseignement superieur

Clark RP (1997) The Global Imperative AnInterpretative History of the Spread of HumankindBoulder CO Westview Press

Costello P (1993) World Historians and Their GoalsTwentieth-century Answers to Modernism DeKalbNorthern Illinois University Press

Dawkins K (1997) Gene Wars The Politics ofBiotechnology New York Seven Stories Press

de Benoist A (1996) lsquoConfronting globalizationrsquo Telos108 pp 117ndash137

Dussel E (1998) Etica de la Liberacion en la edad deglobalizacion y de la exclusion Madrid EditorialTrotta

Elias N (1992) Time An Essay Cambridge MA BasilBlackwell

Featherstone M (1995) Undoing CultureGlobalization Postmodernism and Identity LondonSage Publications

Fritsche J (1999) Historical Destiny and NationalSocialism in Heideggerrsquos Being and Time Berkeleyand Los Angeles University of California Press

Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of SocietyCambridge Polity Press

Giddens A (1987) Social Theory and ModernSociology Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of ModernityCambridge Polity Press

Gray J (1998) False Dawn The Delusions of GlobalCapitalism London Granta Books

Grossberg L (1999) lsquoSpeculations and articulations ofglobalizationrsquo Polygraph 11 pp 11ndash48

Habermas J (1992) Postmetaphysical ThinkingPhilosophical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (1998) The Inclusion of the Other Studiesin Political Theory Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (2001) The Postnational ConstellationPolitical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Hall Sir Peter (1998) Cities in Civilization New YorkPantheon Books

Hamacher W (1997) lsquoOne 2 many multiculturalismsrsquoin H de Vries and S Weber (eds) ViolenceIdentity and Self-determination Stanford CAStanford University Press

Haraway D (1991) Simians Cyborgs and WomenThe Reinvention of Nature New York Routledge

Hardt M and Negri A (2000) Empire CambridgeMA Harvard University Press

Harvey D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity AnEnquiry into the Origins of Cultural ChangeCambridge MA Basil Blackwell

Hayles NK (1999) How we Became PosthumanVirtual Bodies in Cybernetics Literature and

8 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

criticisms vacuous and naive Those whodefend and blithely celebrate globalizationdo so only because they pay attention toone or two privileged and favourite aspectsof the process of global integration with-out regard or concern for its other aspectsIn this way these latter turn into spokes-persons of the worst aspects of this newworld order There is either too muchindeterminacy vague notions about whatconstitutes globalization or too much one-dimensionality privileging of one or twoareas of society as the catalysts of global-ization (Veseth 1998 Grossberg 1999Short et al 2000) This situation howeveris being masterfully remedied by the recentwork of Held McGrew Goldblatt andPerraton which synthesizes erudite analy-ses and masterful summaries They havealso gathered in a volume a wide spanningand heterogenous reading list of the differ-ent positions theories and analyses ofglobalization (Held et al 1999 Held andMcGrew 2000)

The following reflections hope to nav-igate a middle path between the Charybdisof euphoric and celebratory pronounce-ments about the ineluctability of global-ization by what many take to be the newapologists of a pax america and the Scyllaof equally strong but dismissive and vis-ceral counter-reactions to what many taketo be the latest scourge of capitalism in itshighest and most virulent form Thesereflections will be guided by the empiricallyinformed but deeply sensitive work ofSaskia Sassen who has pioneered what wecan call global sociology or sociology ofglobalization She has been contributingover the last two decades to what I take tobe one of the most sophisticated multi-layered detailed and comprehensive analy-ses of the new world economy and howthis new economy leaves the traces of itsform of accumulation in the physiognomyof the city Her work on immigrationsovereignty the ascendancy of a new post-national legal regime the unbundling ofnational economies and the re-territorial-

izing of global economic and social pro-cesses in the city have painted with broadbut masterful strokes a rich canvass of thenew geography of the political economy inthe age of digitization and finance capital(Sassen 1991 1996 1998 1999 2000)

One of the most important aspects ofSassenrsquos work and this is why it is anindispensable guide in our times is the wayit focuses on the city as a litmus test for oneof the central motifs of her work namelythe denationalizing of the national and thenationalizing of the global In Sassenrsquos workglobalization is not just about the mobilityof capital it is also about the mobility ofpeoples It is about the contestation ofnational policies by transnational andglobal processes and the emergence andformulation of new claims by social agentswithin local geopolitical spaces Indeed anew predominance of the discourse ofhuman rights which supersede and super-vene citizenship rights along with thecentrality of a politics of identity that isundergirded by a politics of presence are tobe understood as contestational and oppo-sitional strategies that face up to theunaccountability fluidity superlegalityand concentration of finance capital inglobal cities

After this critical but sympathetic discus-sion of these two aspects of Sassenrsquos work Iturn to the articulation of what I would liketo call a phenomenology of globalization Ifwe take globalization to be about Wel-tanschaungen gestalts and ways of seeingand reading the world and how these may ormay not correspond with our ldquoexperiencerdquoof the world then the logical tool of analysiswould appear to be phenomenology Byphenomenology is to be understood herethat method that sees concepts as embodiedpractices and practices as interpretative ormeaning granting schemata which in turn areseen as being part of a form of life or socio-historical environment There is no conceptwithout a practice and no practice without aworld In this second part then I seek tounderstand how globalization is an attempt

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 9

to come to terms in a concept and through afigure of thought with how our world islived differently in the age of simultaneityand the collapse of space-time to use Har-veyrsquos terms (Harvey 1989) and how newconceptual matrixes are required to makesense of the emergent forms of life (ie exilesdisplaced people migrants cyber-nomadsjetzet nomad intelligentsia not on the sameplane of power and survival)

The essay closes with a discussion City ofAngels of how ldquoreligionrdquo is rediscovered inthis new context and how resources may belocated within it that can contribute tomeeting the challenges of a globalized worldSuch a turn might be unexpected althoughnot unwarranted In the age of culturalhomogenization of the collapse of culturalborders in which MacDonald and Holly-wood have created a global lingua francadifferences must be highlighted discoveredif not created Religion has become impor-tant again because its seems to profile itselfas the one element of cultures that hasremained and this is contestable partiallyimmune to the homogenizing thrust of glo-balization Religion has become a reservoir ofresistance and difference Fundamentalismas many have noted is unthinkable withoutglobalization (Marty and Appleby 1991 p5) Yet religious renewals and the formationof new religions are also unthinkable with-out processes of globalization Converselyglobalization itself is both augured and accel-erated by processes of religious innovationproselytism and evangelization (Beyer 1994Stackhouse and Paris 2000 p 1 Hopkins etal forthcoming) The conceptual moral herewould be to disabuse ourselves of theEnlightenment prejudice perpetuated andexploited by the discourses on modernitythat religion had not been important had infact ceased to perform a social function andthat suddenly it had become once againnecessary As Jose Casanovarsquos work hasillustrated beautifully such myths defacedsocial reality and diminished theoreticalreflexivity (Casanova 1994 Luhmann 19962000 Mendieta forthcoming b)

I The territorialization of globalization

ldquoLarge cities in the highly developed worldare the places where globalization processesassume concrete localized forms Theselocalized forms are in good part whatglobalization is about We can then think ofcities also as the place where thecontradictions of the internationalization ofcapital either come to rest or conflict If weconsider further that large cities alsoconcentrate a growing share of disadvantagepopulationsmdashimmigrants in both Europeand the United States African Americansand Latinos in the United Statesmdashthen wecan see that cities have become a strategicterrain for a whole series of conflicts andcontradictionsrdquo (Sassen 2000 p 143emphasis added)

From among the many provocative aspectsof Sassenrsquos proposals for deciphering andmaking legible the geopolitics of informationmegapolises I would like to highlight twoaspects The first aspect is what I take to be akind of methodological caution that seems tolead Sassen to articulate her proposal in theform of a conditional in the form of anoption The other has to do with what I taketo be a seeming symmetry between agentsand actors within the new informationmegapolises

Some of Sassenrsquos work could be read asadvocating a kind of ldquomethodological humil-ityrdquo By this I mean that some of Sassenrsquostexts seem to project the idea that if we wantto understand the new geography of inequal-ity of the over-valorization of capital and thede-valorization of human potential as dualaspects of globalization that coagulate inspecific contestations within localizedspaces then we better look at global citiesThere is a conditionality here that seems tooffer an option as though we could under-stand the contemporary situation independ-ent of the new mega-urbanization anddemographic explosion that humanity isundergoing I grant Sassen the benefit of thedoubt and I assume that this ifndashthen type ofargumentation is really a rhetorical ploy

10 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Nonetheless I will suggest that there is noway in which we can understand what ishappening to the world to our societies toour environments to the seas to the airaround the entire planet and so on if we donot look at three related factors the unprec-edented concentration of humans in citiesthe growth of the human population and theincrease in certain forms of consumptionLet me cite a few statistics At the turn of the20th century 150 million people lived incities that is about one-tenth of the worldpopulation were city dwellers In contrastsby 2006 basically now it is estimated that32 billion people will live in cities which isa 20-fold increase (OrsquoMeara 1999 p 5)What this means is that for the first time inthe history of our species we have finallybegun to be predominantly city dwellersBut this is not the whole story While the19th and 20th centuries were the centuries ofthe great industrial metropolis of the so-called advanced world the so-called modernworld the cities of the 21st century will bethe cities of the developing world the so-called Third World the purportedly not-yetmodern world Note for instance that someof the largest cities today are in the southernsection of the geopolitical map Mexico City181 million Bombay 180 Sao Paulo 177Shanghai 142 Seoul 129 (State of theWorldrsquos Cities 1999)

In short the largest urbanizing areas of theplanet are those areas that are most vulner-able and perhaps least ready to assume thechallenges of massive concentrations of peo-ple in their already over-stretched urbancentres Let me be more specific While moreand more people migrate to cities in the so-called industrializing nations the disparitiesbetween the developed and the developingworld continues to grow Let me cite theHuman Development Report of 1998Twenty per cent of the worldrsquos people in thehighest income countries account for 86 oftotal private consumption while the poorest20 account for a minimal 13 Let me justnote also that the richest fifth (living in theinformation cities that Sassen studies)

d consume 58 of total energy while thepoorest fifth less that 4

d have 74 of all telephone lines thepoorest fifth 15

d consume 84 of all paper the poorestfifth 15

d own 87 of the worldrsquos vehicle fleet thepoorest fifth less that 1 (United NationsDevelopment Programme 1998 pp2ndash4)

To these ratios and statistics we would haveto add the telling statistics of the actualnumber of people who have computers accessto an internet connection wireless connec-tions and electricity Couple these abysmallyasymmetrical levels of consumption and own-ership with the fact that the fifth of worldpopulation in the wealthiest countries (USACanada Germany Japan France UK)account for 53 of carbon dioxide emissionswhile the poorest fifth for only 30

This all paints an apocalyptic picture adoomsday scenario not unlike that so pro-phetically captured by Ridley Scott in hisfilm Blade Runner which projects an anar-chical urban bazaar teeming with massesfrom all corners of the world speaking somepost-Babelian pidgin ever in the shadow ofdark clouds that conceal a fading sun alwaysbathed in radioactive rain

I would like now to turn to the secondaspect of my thematization of some aspectsof Sassenrsquos work Her analysis at least as it isreproduced here seems to leave open theway for an interpretation that would seeglobal financial interests global capital aspossessing the same type of leverage ashuman global actors have If we see the cityas a strategic site for the deployment ofdenationalizing and re-territorializing pro-cesses and contestations does this mean thatall agents are on the same level Is this newtopology of power characterized by a lev-elled plain And here I would have to sayno In other words it is not the case that theglobalizing that is operated and executed byglobal financial networks is of the samecharacter and extent as that which is enacted

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 11

by immigrants and women of colour tomention the actors Sassen mentions

I will go a step forward and focus on theUSA Home to at least four of the mostimportant megapolises in the circuits oftechnology information finance capital aswell as immigration and urban oppositionalpolitics from below (New York ChicagoLos Angeles and Miami) the USA has had along history of bias against cities Thesebiases are built into the tax structures at thefederal and local levels They are built into thevery policies of the Welfare State and theallocation of national wealth through devel-opment grants tax incentives brakes grantsand loans etc A whole series of factors hasbuilt a complex web of legal and tax codesinfra-structure construction developmentincentives etc that adversely affects the coreareas of cities and which simultaneouslyrewards urban sprawl privatization highwayconstruction and urban capital flight In briefin the USA at least very clearly and con-certedly since the end of World War IIhousing taxing educational highway con-structions policies etc have conspired toproduce the hollowing of cities and theexpansion of a socially wasteful and eco-logically devastating urban sprawl The majorinfo-megapolises of the New Brave World ofsurreal wealth are oases of grotesque luxuryin the midst of vast deserts of povertycrumbling infra-structure rusting bridgesbroken public phones poor and unsuitablepublic schools and the litany can go Thislogic of urban development in the USA hasbeen a luxury that can only be bought at theexpense of the asymmetries which I pointedout earlier And here I would like to referpeople to the work of Daniel D Luria andJoel Rogers on a new urban politics for the21st century (Jackson 1985 Massey andDenton 1993 Luria and Rogers 1999)

The point however that I am trying toelaborate is the following It is simply not thecase that different actors enter the territoryof the global city on the same level In fact itis a territory that is already organized in sucha way as to preclude certain agents from

confronting from elaborating their rights tothe city with the same level of force andefficacy that transnationals enact and enforcetheir claims on urban space My questionthen would be how do we develop ananalysis that takes into account the unlev-elled terrain that constitutes the new topol-ogy of power in which certain actors aremore clearly at a disadvantage than othersWhat new forms of legitimacy and politicscan we appeal to or begin to configure whenurban dwellers find themselves historicallycondemned to always stand in a substan-tively adverse situation of economic polit-ical and legal power vis-a-vis the sub-stantively effective legal financial andpolitical forces of globalizing finance capitalIn what way in short can we begin toelaborate a politics of the right to the city touse that felicitous phrase of Henri Lefebvrewhich unquestionably will become the num-ber one form of politics in this age of mega-cities and hyper-urbanization from thestandpoint of those who have been histor-ically excluded from exercising their rights totheir cities (Lefebvre 1969)

II A phenomenology of globalization

ldquoThe expression lsquophenomenologyrsquo can beformulated in Greek as legein taphainomena But legein meansapophainesthai Hence phenomenologymeans apophphainesthai taphainomena mdashto let what shows itself beseen from itself just as it shows itself fromitself That is the formal meaning of thetype of research that call itselflsquophenomenologyrsquo But this expressesnothing other than the maxim formulatedabove lsquoTo the things themselvesrsquo rdquo(Heidegger 1996 p 30)

I turn now to the presentation of what I calla phenomenology of globalization By aphenomenology of globalization I under-stand the analysis of those experiences thathuman beings in varying degrees are under-going as a result of new socio-economic-

12 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

cultural and political processes which in turncondition the horizon of all possible expecta-tions against which new experiences arepossible at all

Human experience happens against a spa-tio-temporal background the life-world Atthe same time human experience projectsitself forward into a horizon of expectationsthat is conditioned by the structures of thelife-world Human experience therefore isalways framed or structured by spatial andtemporal co-ordinates Ideas of the world orworld-views are coagulations of those spa-tio-temporal configurations (Giddens 19841987) Images of the world or world-imagesare ways in which we understand our rela-tionships to space and time For this reasonthe way we conceptualize the world imaginethe world mirrors the way we conceptualizeourselves as humans The point of thesereflections is to begin to think of global-ization as a way of viewing the world as animage of the world (Heidegger 1977) And tothis extent then globalization acquires aphilosophical status that requires a phenom-enological analysis (Jameson 1998)

In the following I would like to describewhat I take to be fundamental elements of aphenomenology of globalization I discussfour points of departure for a phenomenol-ogy of globalization from the perspective ofthose most adversely affected by the impactsand transformations unleashed by global-ization It is also clear that they betray aWestern perspective although one which isconscious of the privilege and narrownessthat underwrites and supports it

First any phenomenology of globalizationwill have to begin with the descriptionanalysis and study of the exponential accel-eration of the production and disseminationof information Of course information is notknowledge Knowledge might be broadlydefined as ldquoa set of organized statements offacts or ideas presenting a reasoned judg-ment or an experimental result which istransmitted to others through some commu-nication medium rdquo (see Castells 1996 Vol1 p 17 n 27) Information on the other

hand presupposes knowledge and dataMore precisely information is the commu-nication of knowledge and data in such away that the latter has to be discriminatedfrom the former Data are made up of rawstatements and experimental results withoutthe reasoned judgment No one will deny theleaps in knowledge acquisition and informa-tion transmission that have taken place overthe last 50 years since the atom bomb wasfirst invented and exploded over desert atLos Alamos It is this glaring transformationof our knowledge of the world ourselves andthe cosmos in general that has incited someto call this the ldquoinformation agerdquo

If we follow Karl Jaspers as well asPierre Chaunu and Ferdinand Braudel wemight suggest that every major epochaltransformation in human consciousness wascatalysed by transformations in the meansof acquisition of knowledge and its com-munication through different media ortools of information The axial period ofwhich Jaspers spoke in his work on TheOrigin and Goal of History which tookplace between the 6th and 2nd centuriesbefore Christ had to do with the inventionof books the development of major citiesand the expansion of networks of economicexchange in terms of trade routes (Jaspers1953) At this time however paper andbooks were fragile expensive and to a largeextent tools of luxury and privilegeKnowledge of the world was guided bymythological world-views which were con-trolled by almost unassailable authoritiesThe 16th century another axial age wasmarked by the printing revolution inaugu-rated by Gutenberg the establishment ofnew trade routes and the secularization ofknowledge production and distributionwith the emergence of philosophers andintellectuals

The 20th century has marked yet anothershift in the way we produce and distributeknowledge and disseminate it as informa-tion One of the greatest unsung and neglec-ted triumphs of the 20th century has beenthe institutionalization of mass education

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 13

Many have been the horrors that havevisited cultures through their encounterwith the nation-state but one of the clearbenefits of this encounter has been thedevelopment of mass literacy and the estab-lishment of education institutions that are ifnot de facto at least nominally open to allcitizens of the state Talcott Parsons calledthis achievement of the nation-state theeducational revolution Amartya Sen forinstance has urged us to measure absolutepoverty in terms of the years of schoolingalong with access to potable water qualityof air and access to minimally nutritiousfood (Sen 1999) But this is only the leastnoticeable although perhaps the mostimportant aspect of the information revolu-tion of the 20th century The most notice-able is of course the computer and tele-communications revolutions Jeremy Rifkinhas appropriately suggested that we talk interms of the ldquobio-tech centuryrdquo and that weunderstand that the genetic computer andtelecommunications revolutions are differ-ent flanks of one same front the informa-tion revolution (Rifkin 1998) DNA wasdiscovered by Watson and Crick in 1953 in1990 the USA launched the Genome proj-ect by the turn of the third millennium theentire human genome plus the genetic makeup of the most important foods will becontrolled by a few multinationals (Daw-kins 1997) In the USA already over 25of the grain produced is genetically engi-neered Presently one of the most impor-tant conflicts between the USA and Europesince the deployment of missiles throughoutWestern Europe during the 1960s and 1980sis brewing over the import of geneticallyaltered produce and meats You might wantto call this bio-tech imperialism but youmay also call it the carrying out to itslogical conclusion of the ldquoagricultural revo-lutionrdquo (Shiva 1991 1997 1999) Similarlythe computer was invented during the1940s but only began to be mass producedin the 1970s Today any laptop has morecomputational power than all of the com-puters of the first generation put together

Micro-chips are superseded every 18months with each new cycle increasingexponentially the speed memory and con-centration of micro-processors In 1957 theRussians launched Sputnik the first artificialsatellite the Americans followed in 1962with the launching of Telstar 1 the firsttelevision satellite Today there are morethan 200 satellites forming a canopy ofelectric nodes linking the world in a net ofsynchronous telecommunications It is pro-jected that by the first decade of the nextmillennium there will be more than 300satellites (National Geographic 1999)

One of the fundamental characteristics ofthe modern world is that the extraction ofraw materials and their transformation intocommodities has been demoted from itsplace of privilige in bourgeois capitalism bythe production of scientific knowledge andits dissemination as information This is whatthe information revolution amounts tonamely the superseding of the industrialrevolution by the transformation both in themeans and object of production (Baudrillard1981 Lash and Urry 1994 Lowe 1995)Today what matters is not the raw materialand the possession of the means of produc-tion instead what matters is the knowledgethat allows one to discover even invent rawmaterials which are processed through ever-changing means of production The clearestexample of this is the bio-tech industrywhere Monsanto is the perfect illustration ofthe supervening of raw materials and meansof production by the production of knowl-edge that controls seeds and how they areprocessed (Lappe and Bailey 1998 Rifkin1998)

Second the acceleration of the productionand information dissemination has had adirect and evident impact on the way wethink about history and tradition The dura-bility and unifying role of our world-viewsor images of the world is a function of therelationship between our individual bodilyexperience of space and time and the way theworld surrounding us itself undergoeschange The world around us in turn is

14 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

made up of the social world and the naturalworld Each one has its own rhythms andtime (Kubler 1962 Elias 1992 Heidegger1992 Benford 1999) In light of this weshould speak of a biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time (Wal-lerstein 1991) Biomorphic space-time is theway space and time are experienced by theindividual The clock that measures thisspace-time might be said to be the biologicalclock of each human being Social space-timeis what social groups societies communitieslive and experience This space-time is meas-ured in generations historical processesevents the rise and fall of cities The motor ofthis space-time is the level of socio-technicaldevelopment of a society its infra-structuresand super-structures World space-time is thepace at which the natural world evolves andtransforms seasons come and go rivers runand dry up mountains erode plains dry upand become deserts and forests are cut downand grow up or turn into shrubbery andwasteland The further back we look in thehistory of humanity the more disjointed andseparate were the rhythms at which thesedifferent clocks ran and operated

Today there is a convergence of the speedsof these different space-times If we comparethe speed of world space-time and bio-morphic space-time we find that they arerunning almost simultaneously In otherwords the more our own life-spans arelengthened and world space-time the timeor speed at which the world itself changesshrinks the more unstable and local are ourworld-views or images of the world Cosmo-logical views as well as abstract universalitywere able to be sustained as long as the worlddid not seem not to change and humans hadsuch short life-spans that any substantivechange in the world was not noticeable andexperienceable by any two or three genera-tions Pierre Chaunu (1974) remarked thatone of the fundamental elements in thepossibility for the communication of knowl-edge was the lengthening of the life-spans ofhumans during and after the 16th centuryToday we have the convergence of unprece-

dented human life-spans (to the extent thatsome societies are registering the divergentvectors of the general ageing of their popula-tions and the lowering of infant mortalitywhere both are clearly a function of theimprovement in general medicine and itshaving been made more broadly available)with unprecedentedly accelerated worldchanges The latter is not simply a meremirage occasioned by almost synchronousworld communication It is the case that weare changing the face of the planet in waysthat not just generations but individuals areable to note and distinctly remember In thisway we can talk about the malleability oftradition and the arbitrariness of history Inother words what Harvey and Giddenscalled respectively the compression and col-lapse of space-time manifests itself in thecontemporary plurification of historicalmethodologies and re-narrativation of histo-ries as well as the skepticism that anyhistorical chronology is not a function ofsome ideological agenda Historical revisionhas become the daily bread of the historicallycynical masses of peoples who cannot read inhistory the telos of either emancipation orrationality In the age of globalization reasondoes not entail freedom nor revolution free-dom nor reason revolution In this way wecan say with Heelas Lash and Morris that welive in an post-traditional or de-tradition-alized world in which these notations thatgave cohesion and direction to the project ofmodernity have been superseded or ren-dered ideological and historicized (Heelas etal 1996)

Third any phenomenology of globaliza-tion must also begin with what I take to be anequally momentous transformation ofhuman societies and this has to do with themega-urbanization of the world We can saythat for most of its history most of humanityhas been rural Cities developed as append-ages to large agricultural areas Cities werefunctional principles of rural areas Even-tually this relationship reversed but onlyafter the city ceased to be a communicationnode for agricultural exchange Cities started

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 15

to acquire their independence when theycould produce their own commoditiesnamely knowledge and political power Thisonly began to happen after the Renaissancewhen major cities were not just ports but alsocentres of learning culture and politicalpower (Hall 1998) This trend howeveronly takes off when industrialization allowscities to become their own productive cen-tres even if they still remain tied to ruralcentres The reversal of the relationshipbetween rural and urban areas howeverbegan to shift in the 1950s during these yearsalready 30 of all humanity lived in citiesThe United Nations projects that by the year2005 50 of humanity will live in citiesHere we must pause and reflect that thismeans that a substantive part of humanitywill still remain rural and that most of thoselsquofarmersrsquo and lsquopeasantsrsquo will be in so-calledThird World countries Nonetheless as EricHobsbawn remarked in his work The Age ofExtremes the ldquomost dramatic and far-reach-ing social change of the second half of the[the twentieth century] is the death of thepeasantryrdquo (Hobsbawn 1994 p 289) Theother side of this reversal of the relationshipbetween city and country is that most mega-cities will be in what is called the ThirdWorld By the third millennium the 10 mostpopulated metropolises of the World will beneither in Europe nor in the USA

These trends can be attributed to a varietyof factors The most important factor in theelimination of the rural is the industrializa-tion of agriculture a process that reached itszenith with the so-called ldquogreen revolutionrdquoof the 1950s and 1960s Under the industrial-ization of agriculture we must understandnot just the introduction of better tools butthe homogenization of agricultural produc-tion by which I mean the introduction on aglobal scale of the mono-cultivo (Shiva1993) We must also include here the elimina-tion of self-subsistent forms of farmingthrough the elimination of self-renewing bio-diverse eco-systems One of the most effec-tive ways however in which the city hasimposed itself over the countryside is

through the projection of images that desta-bilized the sense of tradition and culturalcontinuity so fundamental to the rhythms ofthe countryside Through television radioand now the internet the city assaults thefabric of the countryside Tradition is under-mined by the promises and riches projectedby the tube of plenty the cornucopia of otherpossibilities the television and its world ofinfo-tainment (see Baumanrsquos wonderful dis-cussion of how under the globalization ofentertainment the Benthamian Panopticonturns into the MacWorldInfotainment Syn-opticon (1998a pp 53ndash54))

Indeed one of the most characteristicaspects of globalization is what is called thedecreasing importance of the local the statethe national We therefore need to speakwith Jurgen Habermas and Paul Kennedy ofa post-national constellation in which sover-eign nation-states as territorially localizedhave become less important less in controlof their own spatiality (Kennedy 1993Habermas 2001) But what is forgotten isthat there is a simultaneous process oflocalization in which place acquires a newsignificance certain spaces of course (Feath-erstone 1995) The city is the site at whichthe forces of the local and the global meetthe site where the forces of transnationalfinance capital and the local labour marketsand national infra-structures enter into con-flict and contestation over the city AsSaskia Sassen writes

ldquoThe city has indeed emerged as a site fornew claims by global capital which uses thecity as an lsquoorganizational commodityrsquo butalso by disadvantage sectors of the urbanpopulation which in large cities arefrequently as internationalized a presence asis capital The denationalizing of urbanspace and the formation of new claims bytransnational actors and involvingcontestation raise the questionmdashwhose cityis itrdquo (Sassen 1998 p xx)

The city in fact has become the crossroadfor new denationalizing politics in whichglobal actors capitals and moving peoples

16 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

enter into conflict across a transnationalurban system

Habermas has noted with acuity that oneof the characteristics of the 18th and 19thcenturies was their pronounced fears of theldquomassrdquo ldquothe crowdrdquo (Habermas 2001 p39) Such fears were summarized in the titleof the prescient work by Ortega y GassetThe Revolt of the Masses (1985) As wasnoted already the 18th and the 19th centuriessignalled the reversal of the relationshipbetween countryside and city This reversalmeant the rapid urbanization and demo-graphic explosion in cities which accompanythe rapid industrialization of certain metro-polises of the West London Berlin NewYork Chicago Newark Mexico City PortoAlegre and the non-West New DehliTokyo Beijing Cairo etc Urbanization andIndustrialization gave rise to the spectre ofthe irascible insatiable uncontrollable massthat would raze everything in its path Threeclassical responses emerged Sorel and thecelebration of the creative power of anar-chical and explosive unorganized mass mobi-lization the Marxist-Leninist and theattempt to domesticate and train the creativeand transformative power of social unrestthrough the development of a party machin-ery that would guide the ire and discontentof gathered masses of unemployed andemployed workers and the conservative andreactionary response of an Edmund Burkebut which is also echoed in the works ofphilosophers like Heidegger which dis-dained and vilified the common folk themass in a simple term Das Man The crowdthe mass is consumed and distracted byprattle and curiosity as it wallows in themiasma of inauthenticity and cowardness(Fritsche 1999)

Today such attitudes seem not just foreignbut also unrealistic Most of our experience isdetermined by a continuous mingling withcrowds and large undifferentiated masses ofpeople We get on the road and we areconfronted with traffic jams we get on thesubway and people accost and touch us fromall directions We live in continuous friction

with the stranger the other May we suggestthat the ldquoOtherrdquo has become such an impor-tant point of departure for philosophicalreflection precisely because we exist in such acontinuous propinquity with it Indeed theOther is no longer simply a phantasmagor-ical presence projected and barely discern-ible beyond the boundaries of the ecumenethe polis and the frontiers of the nation-stateAt the same time the discourse about theldquootherrdquo what is called the politics of alteritymarks a shift from the negative discourse ofanxiety and fear epitomized in the termldquoanomierdquo so well diagnosed by DurkheimSimmel and Freud and so aptly described byChristopher Lasch (1979) to the positivediscourse of solidarity inclusion acceptancetolerance citizenship and justice so welldiagnosed and described by Zymunt Bauman(1998b) Ulrich Beck (1997) Anthony Gid-dens (1990) and Jurgen Habermas (2001)

Are there any morals to be extracted fromthis profound transformation in the wayhumanity in general understands itself Forthe longest period of the history of human-kind groups remained both sheltered fromand inured to otherness by the solidity andstability of their traditions and their worldsCultures remained fairly segregated maps ofthe world in which the foreign strange andunknown was relegated beyond the bound-aries of the controllable and surveyable Tothis extent lsquoothernessrsquo was legislated over byreligion the state nature and even historynamely those centres of gravity of cultureand images of the world In an age in whichall traditions are under constant revision andhuman temporality converges with the age ofthe world itself then lsquoothernessrsquo appearsbefore us as naked unmediated otherness weare all others before each other In otherwords neither our sense of identity nor thesense of difference of the other are given apriori they are always discovered consti-tuted and dismantled in the very processes ofencounter The other was always constitutedfor us by extrinsic forces Now the other isconstituted in the very process of our iden-tity formation but in a contingent fashion

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 17

We make others as we make ourselves Thisreflection links up with some insights thatEnrique Dussel has had with respect to therelationship between the emergence of citiesand the development of the first codes ofethics the Hammurabi Code and the BookN of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Dussel1998) Such codes arose precisely becauseindividuals were thrown into the proximityof each other and were thus confronted witheach otherrsquos vulnerability and injurabilityThe injuction to take care of the poor theindigent the orphan the widow the invalidcould only arise out of the urban experienceof the contiguity with the injurable flesh ofthe stranger Today the experience of theindigent other is of the immigrant the exiledthe refugee who build their enclaves in theshadows of the glamorous city of transna-tional capital (King 1990 Sassen 1999) Forthis reason the other and the immigrant areinterchangeable but this also raises the issueof the new global city as a space for therepresentation and formation of post-colo-nial identities Geo-cities are spaces for thereconfiguration of image the imaginationand the imaginary as Arjun Appaduraiargued (1996) In this sense the centrality ofthe urban experience for humanity meansthat otherness is not going to be a meremetaphysical or even phenomenological cat-egory and concern Under the reign of thecity Otherness has become quotidian andpractical

Fourth another fundamental point ofdeparture for a phenomenology of global-ization will have to be the analysis of theplace of technology in our everyday lives Iwould like to understand technology in twosenses First in its broadest sense as ldquothe useof scientific knowledge to specify ways ofdoing things in a reproducible wayrdquo (Bell1976 p 29) Second as a prosthesis of thehuman body Technology to paraphrase awonderful aphorism of William Burroughsis the mind wanting more body I will discussfirst the former sense of technology as ascientific specification for the iterable way ofdoing things In this sense then a hospital is

a social technology like agriculture and cattleraising are material technologies By the sametoken prisons asylums and ghettos are socialtechnologies There is however somethingunique about technology in the 20th centuryand that is that technology itself has becomean object of technology in other words theuse of science in order to produce ever moreefficient ways of doing things in ever morereproducible ways itself has become a tech-nological quest This technology of technol-ogy is what one might call the institutional-ization of invention Alfred NorthWhitehead noted that ldquothe greatest inventionof the 19th century was the invention of themethod of inventionrdquo (Whitehead 1925 p141) What Whitehead attributes to the 19thcentury reached its true apogee in the secondhalf of the 20th century with the institu-tionalization of the research universityWhile the programme of the research uni-versity goes back to the German ideal of theuniversity it is in the USA that this ideagained its highest formalization and statesupport Without question we have to attrib-ute the greatest technological breakthroughsof the 20th century to this unique con-vergence of the state the military and theresearch university what Eisenhower calledthe militaryndashindustrial complex and whatwe now with hindsight should more appro-priately call the militaryndashuniversityndashindus-trial complex (Kenney 1986 Aronowitz2000)

The rise of the nation-state also signifiedthe rise of state-sponsored education and thestate university The university plays a dualrole On the one hand it has the function ofpreparing citizens and workers for the mate-rial and cultural-political self-reproductionof society On the other it has the role ofinstitutionalizing scientific investigation theinvention of invention Through the uni-versity the state invests in its future ability totransform its material technologies of self-reproduction Winning Nobel prizes is notjust a matter of pride it is above all aquestion of institutional power to supportimmense research budgets whose actual

18 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

industrial and technical application might befar off into the future This is one of thereasons why the USA has remained a worldpower despite its apparent military stale-mate namely because it still remains thecentre for the production of most techno-logical innovation

Related to the invention of invention whatI called the institutionalization of the tech-nology of technology as its other side is theinterpenetration of technology in everyaspect of our lives Even those who are notdirectly affected by technological revolutionsin their daily life are nonetheless indirectlyaffected insofar as their worlds economiesand cultures are made vulnerable to take-overs and colonization by those who drivethe technological revolutions of today Forthe longest period of the history of humanitytechnology remained distant from the livesand bodies of men and women not because itdid not impact them but because it did sosporadically and in such tangential ways firethe wheel the printing press the metalplough the steam engine the automobileEach technological innovation however hasmeant a further interpenetration betweentool and human body With this I turn to thediscussion of technology as prosthesis thesecond sense of technology I want to con-sider in light of a phenomenology ofglobalization

A technology is a way of doing things inways that can be reproduced again andagain and that therefore can be taught andpassed on Culture is in this sense the mostcomplex and important technology of all Inthis sense a technology is a way for asociety to extend itself across time fromgeneration to generation century to century(Giddens 1984 1987) A technology gen-erally instantiated itself in tools Tools allowparticular individuals to reach beyond theboundaries of their own bodies A tool is anextension of a particular bodily organ thataugments its original performance Tool andbody however have remained relatively dis-tinct even if one can claim that the hand isa product of our invention of tools

(Rothenberg 1993) Recognition of the dis-tinctness between tool and body does notentail the negation of their dialectical inter-dependence and co-modification Their dis-tinctness was sustained by what I havealready referred to above as the temporalityof humans and the time of the world Whenthe time of humans and the world convergewhat mediates their encounter tools hasalready fused with the body or has alreadymade the world immediate Our experienceof the world is already so mediated by ourtechnological tools that we cannot distin-guish the world from the tool and thesefrom the body We are our tools We are ourtechnological prosthesis because they arethe world (Brahm and Driscoll 1995) Butthis does not mean that technology is itselftransparent Rather technology itself hasbecome like our bodies in the sense that wedo not know how our livers hearts orbrains work we just assume that they willdo what they were designed to do and ifthey break down then we go to aspecialist

Everywhere we are surrounded by techno-logical devices which have insinuated them-selves in our lives and without which wecannot do the watch the telephone the carthe television but also toothpaste X-raysvaccines birth control pills condoms sunscreen eye-glasses shavers purified andchlorinated water and so on

What I am talking about can be illustratedby comparing Mary Shelleyrsquos Frankensteinin which a creation out of human partsbecomes monstrous precisely because itentails the complete instrumentalization ofour bodies and thus a sacrilage of its allegeddivine naturalness and Donna Harawayrsquosborgs which demonstrate and theorize towhat extent we are always already synthetic(Haraway 1991) There is no nature outsidethe confines of the laboratory Resistance isfutile to the logic of technology because weare all already borg we are products of ourtechnologies and nature exists only as anArcadian fantasy This reading should not betaken to be suggesting that nature does not

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 19

exist in the sense that it is a fiction the mirageof radical social constructivism Rather thepoint is to highlight the ways in which natureis to be thought of in terms of what today wecall the lsquorecursive loopsrsquo between technologyand nature in which nature is already anlsquoartefactrsquo and lsquomachinesrsquo are natural (Hayles1999) Indeed appropriating Marxrsquos languagefrom his 1844 manuscripts we have to talkabout the humanization of machines and themechanization of humanity

Is there a moral to be extracted by theinterpenetration of humans and their techno-logical prosthesis to the point that youcannot distinguish them any longer I wouldsay that a Heideggerian response to thisquestion is anachronistic and indefensibleOn the other hand a dia-mat in the sense ofEngelsrsquos dialectical materialism will not doeither Science is neither metaphysically badnor a malleable ideological epiphenomenonAgainst these two positions I would advo-cate what has been called Kranzbergrsquos lawwhich reads ldquotechnology is neither good norbad nor is it neutralrdquo (Castells 1996 Vol 1p 65)

I would like to summarize my reflectionsby suggesting that once a phenomenology ofglobalization takes seriously the points ofdeparture discussed above we will discoverthat globalization might stand for anotheraxial period This new axial age will becharacterized by at least these four themesfirst the perpetual revolutionizing of pro-duction technologies has turned into thetechnology of innovation in such a way thatthe generation of capital is relocated to theproduction of new information technologiesand not production and processing of rawmaterials Second because of the almostinstantaneous information transmission andreception across the world and the con-vergence of natural historical and personaltemporalities we have the effect of the de-transcendentalization and temporalization oftradition These de-transcendentalizationsand temporalizations suggest that our imagesof the world will be at the reach of our owndesign In this sense we will be able to speak

of the true secularization of the world and itscomplete humanization Third is the routini-zation and de-metaphysicalization of other-ness brought about by the hyper-urbaniza-tion of humanity Otherness will become aproduct of society and in this sense we willhave to talk of regimes of alterization Thelsquootherrsquo then will become a continuouspresence that will require our constant con-cern and vigilance Fourth is the dissolutionof the boundary between natural and syn-thetic body and tool technology and natureWe will have to speak then of the age inwhich humans have become their own crea-tions and in which the directions of thereproduction of both mind and body cultureand technology will become a concern ofpolitical practice of paramount importance

The image of the world projected byglobalization is one which collapses thedifferences between biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time whatwe see is what we get To put it in thelanguage of an essay by Theodor Adorno thehistory of nature is no different from thehistory of humanity (Adorno 1984) Global-ization also projects an image of the world inwhich otherness is not external and intract-able but produced from within Finallyglobalization is an image of the world inwhich the natural and the social the createdand uncreated have been brought togetherunder the insight that we have been produc-ing ourselves as we have been producingtools to alter the world Now however theproducing of our tools is not different fromthe production of ourselves and our worldIn the image of the world projected byglobalization the world is humanity lookingat itself through its eyes and not the eyes ofa god history or nature

III City of angels

ldquoWho is the observer when it concerns thequestion about the function of religion thesystem of religion itself or science as anexternal observerrdquo (Luhmann 2000 p 118)

20 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

The kind of phenomenology of globalizationthat I sketched above allows us to ask aboutthe kinds of challenges religion faces in anage of globalization For religion appears as aresource of images concepts traditions andpractices that can allow individuals andcommunities to deal with a world that ischanging around them by the hour (Robert-son and Garrett 1991 Luhmann 2000) Inthe new Unubersichtlichkeit [unsurveyabil-ity] of our global society religion appears ascompendium of intuitions that have not beenextinguished by the so-called process ofsecularization (Mendieta forthcoming a)Most importantly however religion cannotbe dismissed or derided because it is theprivileged if not the primary form in whichthe impoverished masses of the invisiblecities of the world (those cities to which Ipointed in the first part of this essay)articulate their hopes as well as critique theirworld

The first challenge to religion that ourphenomenology of globalization allow us toarticulate has to do with the lsquode-transcenden-talizing of othernessrsquo or what I also wouldlike to call the lsquoroutinization of othernessrsquoThere is a correlation between the wayhumanity has conceptualized otherness met-aphysically and conceptually on the onehand and humanityrsquos relationship to real andconcrete otherness as it has been experiencedexistentially and phenomenologically on theother hand This correlation has been medi-ated by humanityrsquos decreasing ruralism Inother words the less rural and thus the moreurban dwelling humans have become theless other is the otherness that we can thinkof or dream up The suggestion is that themetaphysics of alterity that has guided somuch of Western theology and religiousthinking over the last 2000 years has beendetermined by a particular asymmetrybetween the country and the city For thelongest history of humanity most societieshave been farming and rural-dwelling com-munities and associations Contact betweenextremely different communities and societ-ies was sporadic and rare and when contact

did occurred this was meditated by citydwellers and the long memory of popularmythologies But as was noted above in thedawning 21st century most humans will becity dwellers Furthermore In the 21st cen-tury most humanity will be conglomerated inthe mega-urbes of the Third World Underthis circumstance the holy other the abso-lutely other will be deflated Alterity and theextraordinary what can also be called thetremendum are de-mystified and de-met-aphysicalized (Habermas 1992 Placher1996) Either everyone will be a stranger orno one will be because we will all bestrangers in a city of strangers In such asituation otherness will have become a rou-tine an un-extra-ordinary event How thenare we to think divine alterity the othernessof the holy in a situation in which onto-logically and metaphysically all alterity hasbeen deflated demoted rendered normallevelled to the cotidian Are we in a situationof having to ldquorisk a new idea of holinessrdquo asBarry Taylor Pastor at the Sanctuary Churchin Santa Monica put it This would have tobe a holiness which is not other worldly buta holiness which is about the difference anduniqueness of others those who are oureveryday other with whom we ride thesubway with whom we walk the streets ofpopulated mega-urbes of the new age withwhom we share in anonymity the crowdedspaces of the new cities The real andmetaphorical wilderness of the world of itsjungles and forests of its undiscovered con-tinents and untamed seas of its unmappeddeserts and unnavigated rivers were excusesas well instigations to go searching for godbeyond the familial the urbane the too closeand already lsquodomesticatedrsquo God was beyondthe world other than the world Now thequestion is how do we discover the other inthe mundane difference of every fellowhuman being and the crowded city ofstrangers

The second challenge has to do with thecity as locus of the culture of consumptionas the site for an ethos of immediacyhedonism and hyper-excitation Sassen

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 21

speaks of the city as the crossroads of aconfrontation between the flows of capitaland the flows of peoples One of the waysthese flows clash in cities is through theconfrontation between cultures that isbetween different modalities of life Themore people become urban dwellers themore people are exposed to the cornucopiaof cultural possibilities It is not just thatmore people are in cities it is also that morepeople are seeking to participate in thestandards of life promised by urban dwellingThe challenges are unprecedented We arepresently choking in our own refuse in ourown garbage The psychological toil mustalso be unprecedented The level of unmetexpectations unfilled desires the gapbetween universally promised but exorbi-tantly expensive commodities that shatteredself-images and worth and that are availableto a relatively small fraction of the worldpopulation has grown exponentially Thereis another underside to the city as thecrossroads of the clash of modalities of lifeThe more cities grow the more they exerttheir pull on the so-called hinterland therural areas The more agriculture is mecha-nized and industrialized the more we adoptbiotechnology the more superfluous ldquofarm-ersrdquo become At the same time the expansionof telecommunications television and paidfor television and satellite connections havemade it easier to link up and peer into theldquotube of plentyrdquo to use that wonderfulphrase by Erik Barnouw (1990 [1975]) Thecity literally and metaphorically consumes itshinterland its outlying areas of supply itconsumes its resources and produce but alsoits cultures and its peoples

It is perhaps unnecessary to underscoreagain that most of the consumption of ruralresources is taking place in the metropolisesof the so-called First World So not onlymust we address the rampant and rapaciousconsumerism of cities in general but also theparticularly scandalous and grotesque asym-metry between the consumption of FirstWorld cities and Third World cities Thisissue becomes particularly pressing when in

the so-called advanced nations of the worldwe have thinkers intellectuals and criticstalking about a politics and culture of inclu-sion and tolerance (Habermas 1998) Thispolitics of inclusion is articulated with thebest intentions in mind The assumptionguiding it is that people throughout theworld would be better if they could partici-pate more equitably in the same kinds of so-called basic needs and luxuries that wewesterners enjoy But there is somethingprofoundly disingenuous and deleteriouslynaotildeve about such a view In some cases thepoverty of those across the world to whomwe would like to extend our standard ofliving is due precisely to our luxury Thatwhich we want to share is the cause of theprivation we want to alleviate Thus perhapsthe agenda should not be one of inclusionbut of dismantling the system that occa-sioned in the first place the exclusions webenefited and continue to benefit from

In this situation then the challengebecomes how to think of an urban culture offrugality The challenge is how to translatethe religious message and teaching of povertyas a holy way as a holy calling into a secularvalue a secular calling Another way ofputting it would be how do we translate thevisions of the desert fathers St Francis ofAssisi Mohandas Gandhi into an urbanvision for a spiritually starving youth Oralternatively if we think of what ArnoldToynbee and Eric Hobsbawn said about the20th century namely that its greatestachievement was the expansion of the middleclass then the goal for the 21st centuryshould be the expansion of a globalizedldquoliving level classrdquo In other words we haveto develop a culture for which the greatestachievement is not that everyone else will livelike us but that we will live at the level thatallows the most people to share in the mostfundamental goods potable water clean airinfant nutrition to sustain healthy standardsof unstunted growth and the possibility ofbasic education Here I would have to saythat I concur with Hardt and Negri on theircanonization of Assisi as a saint in the

22 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

hagiography of revolutionary militancy(2000 p 413)

The third challenge that our phenomenol-ogy of globalization allows us to elucidate hasto do with one of its central locus of analysisnamely the city If cities have become the siteswhere the unbundling of the state takes placethat is if we take cities to be the sites for thede-nationalizing of the national and if we atthe same time take the city as the locus of anemergent juridification or process of legal-ization of new forms of relationships then arewe not in need of having to re-think therelationship between the legal and politicalstructures of the emergent supra-nationalstate and the para- or extra-statist ldquochurchrdquoAnother way of putting it would be to notethat the church at least in the West antecedesthe modern nation-state In fact the churchwas the state and that partly because of thisthe quest for modernity the process ofmodernization entailed a secularization ofstate and legal structures In the process thechurchrsquos sphere of operation becamerestricted or constrained by the spaces drawnby the boundaries of nation-states Churchesand denominations became identified withnational boundaries which took place not-withstanding the underlying and fundamentaluniversalist thrust of Christianity If weaccept Sassenrsquos analysis which we must giventhe overwhelming evidence then we areinescapably put in the situation of having tore-think the relationship between the churchand the state In fact as the nation-states of the19th and 20th century are unbundled andnew forms of political and legal rights emergein de-territorialized and de-nationalizedforms of political self-determination then thechurch itself will have to face its de-national-ization and de-territorialization At the sametime however one of the fundamental condi-tions of the presence of the church in the 21stcentury will have to be that it must havelearned the lessons of the last 500 years ofcolonialism imperialism and post-colonial-ism This means that the challenge is dual Onthe one hand the new church must find aplace beyond the nation-states of political

modernity but on the other hand it must doso with a post-colonialist and post-imperialistattitude In the age of global transformationsthe new church cannot and will not be able toserve as an agent of globalization for the newimperial masters that began to profile them-selves in the horizon namely a united front ofEuropean nations (an expanded NATO) atechnological elite bent on re-designingnature and a cosmopolitan nobility withoutcontrols allegiances or consciences

Fourth and finally I think that anotherextremely important challenge has to do withthe insight that cities are the places wherecultures come to cultivate each other Inother words cities are the places where oldcultures are cannibalized but also carniv-alized where old cultures which are dyingcome to be renewed but also where newcultures are produced from the remains ofold ones (Hamacher 1997) Cities are germi-nals of new cultures Indeed just as we arevery likely to find micro-climates in mostglobal cities we are likely to find culturalenclaves little Italys Chinatowns Japan-towns little Bombays etc These places arewhere the centripetal and centrifugal forcesof homogenization and heterogenizationinteract to produce new cultural formationsUnderlying this new cultural genesis is itsevident and almost presentist character Theprocesses of cultural genesis take place rightin front of our eyes Cultures are notmillennial sedimentations and even thatwhich is peddled as the oldest is a present-day version of the old Most importantlycultures have become something we produceand choose cultures are something which weeither nurture and preserve or abandon anddisavow In all of these cases we are notpassive but active agents of transformationIn this situation the challenge for the newchurch for an urban ministry for the 21stcentury is how to develop an ecclesiology ofcultural diversity How will the new churchparticipate in this cultural genesis that isgerminating in global cities while retaining asense of identity Or conversely how will itretain a sense of cultural identity without

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 23

becoming either ethnocentric or jingoisticabout its cultural bequest without contribut-ing to the ossification of its own culture Onwhat terms can the new church participate inthe creation of new cultures and the preser-vation of successful ones

Conclusion

Cities are the vortex of the convergence ofthe processes of globalization and local-ization Cities are epitomes of glocalizationto use Robertsonrsquos language (1994) They arealso sites of the sedimentation of history Inthis essay I have sough to advance theresearch agenda that would take the ldquoinvisi-ble citiesrdquo of the so-called Third World astheir primary object of analysis At the sametime however I have urged that we look atthe cities in the developed industrializedworld through the eyes of their invisibleinhabitants and citizens immigrants ethnicminorities disenfranchised groups workerswomen and the youth There are invisiblecities within the cities that are so visible inmost urban theory and analysis as well asinvisible cities that remain unseen becausethey are not on the horizon of the academicagendas of researchers in the universities ofthe developed world

In tandem I have suspended judgementon whether to be for or against global-ization not because I do not think that wecan make moral judgments in this case butbecause I think we need to broaden ouranalyses of this new order of things Ideveloped some general points of departurefor a phenomenological analysis of global-ization This particular approach I thinkexhibits how ldquoglobalizationrdquo can and oughtto become a matter for serious philosophicalreflection I have identified the issues ofalterity temporality tradition the distinc-tion between the natural and the syntheticas philosophemes that are substantivelyimpacted by the processes of globalizationYet the phenomenological approach Iarticulate is deliberate in assuming a partic-

ular perspective or angle of approach I havesought to delineate a phenomenology ofglobalization from below The world doesnot disclose itself in the same way to allsubjects much less globalization Thus thephenomenology here presented urges us tolook at the world from below from theperspective of those who seem to be moreadversely than beneficially affected by theprocesses that make up globalization

This is what the ldquobelowrdquo in the subtitle ofthe essay pointed to the below of the poorand destitute the below of those who are notseen and do not register in the radar of socialtheory Furthermore I have tried to furtherqualify that perspective from below byfocusing my attention on the issue of reli-gion Religion clearly can mean manythings but at the very least it means ldquothe sighof the oppressedrdquo and the ldquoencyclopediccompendiumrdquo of a heartless world as Marxput it (1994 p 28) if only because it is theform in which the destitute the most vulner-able in our world express their critiques aswell as hopes I have argued that we ought tolook at cities as germinals of new culturesand that if we want to trace the emergentcultures of those ldquobelowrdquo then we betterlook at religious movements In what waysare the religious language of the oppressedand disenfranchised of the invisible cities ofglobalization critiques and resistances toglobalization This is clearly a researchdesideratum rather than a description oreven assessment

Note

1 I want to thank Bob Catterall for encouraging me towrite this article and for his comments on earlyversions of it I also want to thank Lois AnnLorentzen and Nelson Maldonado Torres who readit with great care and made substantive suggestionscorrections and criticisms that have made meunderstand better my own project I also want tothank Enrique Dussel Jurgen Habermas WalterMignolo and Santiago Castro-Gomez with whom Ihave discussed many of the ideas here developedand who have given me impetus to continue alongthis line with their own pioneering works

24 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Bibliography

Adorno TW (1984) lsquoThe idea of natural historyrsquo Telos60 pp 31ndash42

Amin S (1996) Capitalism in the Age of GlobalizationThe Management of Contemporary Society Londonand New York Zed Books

Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large CulturalDimensions of Globalization MinneapolisUniversity of Minnesota Press

Appiah KA (1992) In My Fatherrsquos House Africa in thePhilosophy of Culture New York Oxford UniversityPress

Aronowitz S (2000) The Knowledge FactoryDismantling the Corporate University and CreatingTrue Higher Learning Boston Beacon Press

Barber BR (1995) Jihad vs McWorld How Globalismand Tribalism are Reshaping the World New YorkBallantine Books

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1993) lsquoA globalizingeconomy some implications and consequencesrsquo inB Mazlish and R Buultjens (eds) ConceptualizingGlobal History pp 153ndash172 Boulder COWestview Press

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1994) Global DreamsImperial Corporations and the New World OrderNew York Simon amp Schuster

Barnouw E (1990 [1975]) Tube of Plenty TheEvolution of American Television New YorkOxford University Press

Baudrillard J (1981) For a Critique of the PoliticalEconomy of the Sign St Louis MO Telos Press

Bauman Z (1998a) Globalization The HumanConsequences New York Columbia UniversityPress

Bauman Z (1998b) lsquoPostmodern religionrsquo in P Heelas(ed) Religion Modernity and PostmodernityCambridge Blackwell

Beck U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung Frankfurt amMain Suhrkamp

Bell D (1976) The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism New York Basic Books

Benford G (1999) Deep Time How HumanityCommunicates Across Millenia New York AvonBooks Inc

Beyer P (1994) Religion and Globalization LondonSage

Brahm Jr G and Driscoll M (eds) (1995) ProstheticTerritories Politics and Hypertechnologies BoulderCO Westview

Bretherton C and Ponton G (eds) (1996) GlobalPolitics An Introduction Cambridge Blackwell

Calvino I (1974) Invisible Cities New York HarcourtBrace Jovanovich

Casanova J (1994) Public Religions in the ModernWorld Chicago University of Chicago Press

Castells M (1996ndash8) The Information Age EconomySociety and Culture Vol 1 The Rise of the

Network Society Vol 2 The Power of Identity Vol3 End of Millenium Malden MA and OxfordBlackwell Publishers

Chaunu P (1974) Historie science sociale la dureelrsquoespace et lrsquohomme a lrsquoepoque moderne ParisSociete drsquoedition drsquoenseignement superieur

Clark RP (1997) The Global Imperative AnInterpretative History of the Spread of HumankindBoulder CO Westview Press

Costello P (1993) World Historians and Their GoalsTwentieth-century Answers to Modernism DeKalbNorthern Illinois University Press

Dawkins K (1997) Gene Wars The Politics ofBiotechnology New York Seven Stories Press

de Benoist A (1996) lsquoConfronting globalizationrsquo Telos108 pp 117ndash137

Dussel E (1998) Etica de la Liberacion en la edad deglobalizacion y de la exclusion Madrid EditorialTrotta

Elias N (1992) Time An Essay Cambridge MA BasilBlackwell

Featherstone M (1995) Undoing CultureGlobalization Postmodernism and Identity LondonSage Publications

Fritsche J (1999) Historical Destiny and NationalSocialism in Heideggerrsquos Being and Time Berkeleyand Los Angeles University of California Press

Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of SocietyCambridge Polity Press

Giddens A (1987) Social Theory and ModernSociology Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of ModernityCambridge Polity Press

Gray J (1998) False Dawn The Delusions of GlobalCapitalism London Granta Books

Grossberg L (1999) lsquoSpeculations and articulations ofglobalizationrsquo Polygraph 11 pp 11ndash48

Habermas J (1992) Postmetaphysical ThinkingPhilosophical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (1998) The Inclusion of the Other Studiesin Political Theory Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (2001) The Postnational ConstellationPolitical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Hall Sir Peter (1998) Cities in Civilization New YorkPantheon Books

Hamacher W (1997) lsquoOne 2 many multiculturalismsrsquoin H de Vries and S Weber (eds) ViolenceIdentity and Self-determination Stanford CAStanford University Press

Haraway D (1991) Simians Cyborgs and WomenThe Reinvention of Nature New York Routledge

Hardt M and Negri A (2000) Empire CambridgeMA Harvard University Press

Harvey D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity AnEnquiry into the Origins of Cultural ChangeCambridge MA Basil Blackwell

Hayles NK (1999) How we Became PosthumanVirtual Bodies in Cybernetics Literature and

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 9

to come to terms in a concept and through afigure of thought with how our world islived differently in the age of simultaneityand the collapse of space-time to use Har-veyrsquos terms (Harvey 1989) and how newconceptual matrixes are required to makesense of the emergent forms of life (ie exilesdisplaced people migrants cyber-nomadsjetzet nomad intelligentsia not on the sameplane of power and survival)

The essay closes with a discussion City ofAngels of how ldquoreligionrdquo is rediscovered inthis new context and how resources may belocated within it that can contribute tomeeting the challenges of a globalized worldSuch a turn might be unexpected althoughnot unwarranted In the age of culturalhomogenization of the collapse of culturalborders in which MacDonald and Holly-wood have created a global lingua francadifferences must be highlighted discoveredif not created Religion has become impor-tant again because its seems to profile itselfas the one element of cultures that hasremained and this is contestable partiallyimmune to the homogenizing thrust of glo-balization Religion has become a reservoir ofresistance and difference Fundamentalismas many have noted is unthinkable withoutglobalization (Marty and Appleby 1991 p5) Yet religious renewals and the formationof new religions are also unthinkable with-out processes of globalization Converselyglobalization itself is both augured and accel-erated by processes of religious innovationproselytism and evangelization (Beyer 1994Stackhouse and Paris 2000 p 1 Hopkins etal forthcoming) The conceptual moral herewould be to disabuse ourselves of theEnlightenment prejudice perpetuated andexploited by the discourses on modernitythat religion had not been important had infact ceased to perform a social function andthat suddenly it had become once againnecessary As Jose Casanovarsquos work hasillustrated beautifully such myths defacedsocial reality and diminished theoreticalreflexivity (Casanova 1994 Luhmann 19962000 Mendieta forthcoming b)

I The territorialization of globalization

ldquoLarge cities in the highly developed worldare the places where globalization processesassume concrete localized forms Theselocalized forms are in good part whatglobalization is about We can then think ofcities also as the place where thecontradictions of the internationalization ofcapital either come to rest or conflict If weconsider further that large cities alsoconcentrate a growing share of disadvantagepopulationsmdashimmigrants in both Europeand the United States African Americansand Latinos in the United Statesmdashthen wecan see that cities have become a strategicterrain for a whole series of conflicts andcontradictionsrdquo (Sassen 2000 p 143emphasis added)

From among the many provocative aspectsof Sassenrsquos proposals for deciphering andmaking legible the geopolitics of informationmegapolises I would like to highlight twoaspects The first aspect is what I take to be akind of methodological caution that seems tolead Sassen to articulate her proposal in theform of a conditional in the form of anoption The other has to do with what I taketo be a seeming symmetry between agentsand actors within the new informationmegapolises

Some of Sassenrsquos work could be read asadvocating a kind of ldquomethodological humil-ityrdquo By this I mean that some of Sassenrsquostexts seem to project the idea that if we wantto understand the new geography of inequal-ity of the over-valorization of capital and thede-valorization of human potential as dualaspects of globalization that coagulate inspecific contestations within localizedspaces then we better look at global citiesThere is a conditionality here that seems tooffer an option as though we could under-stand the contemporary situation independ-ent of the new mega-urbanization anddemographic explosion that humanity isundergoing I grant Sassen the benefit of thedoubt and I assume that this ifndashthen type ofargumentation is really a rhetorical ploy

10 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Nonetheless I will suggest that there is noway in which we can understand what ishappening to the world to our societies toour environments to the seas to the airaround the entire planet and so on if we donot look at three related factors the unprec-edented concentration of humans in citiesthe growth of the human population and theincrease in certain forms of consumptionLet me cite a few statistics At the turn of the20th century 150 million people lived incities that is about one-tenth of the worldpopulation were city dwellers In contrastsby 2006 basically now it is estimated that32 billion people will live in cities which isa 20-fold increase (OrsquoMeara 1999 p 5)What this means is that for the first time inthe history of our species we have finallybegun to be predominantly city dwellersBut this is not the whole story While the19th and 20th centuries were the centuries ofthe great industrial metropolis of the so-called advanced world the so-called modernworld the cities of the 21st century will bethe cities of the developing world the so-called Third World the purportedly not-yetmodern world Note for instance that someof the largest cities today are in the southernsection of the geopolitical map Mexico City181 million Bombay 180 Sao Paulo 177Shanghai 142 Seoul 129 (State of theWorldrsquos Cities 1999)

In short the largest urbanizing areas of theplanet are those areas that are most vulner-able and perhaps least ready to assume thechallenges of massive concentrations of peo-ple in their already over-stretched urbancentres Let me be more specific While moreand more people migrate to cities in the so-called industrializing nations the disparitiesbetween the developed and the developingworld continues to grow Let me cite theHuman Development Report of 1998Twenty per cent of the worldrsquos people in thehighest income countries account for 86 oftotal private consumption while the poorest20 account for a minimal 13 Let me justnote also that the richest fifth (living in theinformation cities that Sassen studies)

d consume 58 of total energy while thepoorest fifth less that 4

d have 74 of all telephone lines thepoorest fifth 15

d consume 84 of all paper the poorestfifth 15

d own 87 of the worldrsquos vehicle fleet thepoorest fifth less that 1 (United NationsDevelopment Programme 1998 pp2ndash4)

To these ratios and statistics we would haveto add the telling statistics of the actualnumber of people who have computers accessto an internet connection wireless connec-tions and electricity Couple these abysmallyasymmetrical levels of consumption and own-ership with the fact that the fifth of worldpopulation in the wealthiest countries (USACanada Germany Japan France UK)account for 53 of carbon dioxide emissionswhile the poorest fifth for only 30

This all paints an apocalyptic picture adoomsday scenario not unlike that so pro-phetically captured by Ridley Scott in hisfilm Blade Runner which projects an anar-chical urban bazaar teeming with massesfrom all corners of the world speaking somepost-Babelian pidgin ever in the shadow ofdark clouds that conceal a fading sun alwaysbathed in radioactive rain

I would like now to turn to the secondaspect of my thematization of some aspectsof Sassenrsquos work Her analysis at least as it isreproduced here seems to leave open theway for an interpretation that would seeglobal financial interests global capital aspossessing the same type of leverage ashuman global actors have If we see the cityas a strategic site for the deployment ofdenationalizing and re-territorializing pro-cesses and contestations does this mean thatall agents are on the same level Is this newtopology of power characterized by a lev-elled plain And here I would have to sayno In other words it is not the case that theglobalizing that is operated and executed byglobal financial networks is of the samecharacter and extent as that which is enacted

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 11

by immigrants and women of colour tomention the actors Sassen mentions

I will go a step forward and focus on theUSA Home to at least four of the mostimportant megapolises in the circuits oftechnology information finance capital aswell as immigration and urban oppositionalpolitics from below (New York ChicagoLos Angeles and Miami) the USA has had along history of bias against cities Thesebiases are built into the tax structures at thefederal and local levels They are built into thevery policies of the Welfare State and theallocation of national wealth through devel-opment grants tax incentives brakes grantsand loans etc A whole series of factors hasbuilt a complex web of legal and tax codesinfra-structure construction developmentincentives etc that adversely affects the coreareas of cities and which simultaneouslyrewards urban sprawl privatization highwayconstruction and urban capital flight In briefin the USA at least very clearly and con-certedly since the end of World War IIhousing taxing educational highway con-structions policies etc have conspired toproduce the hollowing of cities and theexpansion of a socially wasteful and eco-logically devastating urban sprawl The majorinfo-megapolises of the New Brave World ofsurreal wealth are oases of grotesque luxuryin the midst of vast deserts of povertycrumbling infra-structure rusting bridgesbroken public phones poor and unsuitablepublic schools and the litany can go Thislogic of urban development in the USA hasbeen a luxury that can only be bought at theexpense of the asymmetries which I pointedout earlier And here I would like to referpeople to the work of Daniel D Luria andJoel Rogers on a new urban politics for the21st century (Jackson 1985 Massey andDenton 1993 Luria and Rogers 1999)

The point however that I am trying toelaborate is the following It is simply not thecase that different actors enter the territoryof the global city on the same level In fact itis a territory that is already organized in sucha way as to preclude certain agents from

confronting from elaborating their rights tothe city with the same level of force andefficacy that transnationals enact and enforcetheir claims on urban space My questionthen would be how do we develop ananalysis that takes into account the unlev-elled terrain that constitutes the new topol-ogy of power in which certain actors aremore clearly at a disadvantage than othersWhat new forms of legitimacy and politicscan we appeal to or begin to configure whenurban dwellers find themselves historicallycondemned to always stand in a substan-tively adverse situation of economic polit-ical and legal power vis-a-vis the sub-stantively effective legal financial andpolitical forces of globalizing finance capitalIn what way in short can we begin toelaborate a politics of the right to the city touse that felicitous phrase of Henri Lefebvrewhich unquestionably will become the num-ber one form of politics in this age of mega-cities and hyper-urbanization from thestandpoint of those who have been histor-ically excluded from exercising their rights totheir cities (Lefebvre 1969)

II A phenomenology of globalization

ldquoThe expression lsquophenomenologyrsquo can beformulated in Greek as legein taphainomena But legein meansapophainesthai Hence phenomenologymeans apophphainesthai taphainomena mdashto let what shows itself beseen from itself just as it shows itself fromitself That is the formal meaning of thetype of research that call itselflsquophenomenologyrsquo But this expressesnothing other than the maxim formulatedabove lsquoTo the things themselvesrsquo rdquo(Heidegger 1996 p 30)

I turn now to the presentation of what I calla phenomenology of globalization By aphenomenology of globalization I under-stand the analysis of those experiences thathuman beings in varying degrees are under-going as a result of new socio-economic-

12 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

cultural and political processes which in turncondition the horizon of all possible expecta-tions against which new experiences arepossible at all

Human experience happens against a spa-tio-temporal background the life-world Atthe same time human experience projectsitself forward into a horizon of expectationsthat is conditioned by the structures of thelife-world Human experience therefore isalways framed or structured by spatial andtemporal co-ordinates Ideas of the world orworld-views are coagulations of those spa-tio-temporal configurations (Giddens 19841987) Images of the world or world-imagesare ways in which we understand our rela-tionships to space and time For this reasonthe way we conceptualize the world imaginethe world mirrors the way we conceptualizeourselves as humans The point of thesereflections is to begin to think of global-ization as a way of viewing the world as animage of the world (Heidegger 1977) And tothis extent then globalization acquires aphilosophical status that requires a phenom-enological analysis (Jameson 1998)

In the following I would like to describewhat I take to be fundamental elements of aphenomenology of globalization I discussfour points of departure for a phenomenol-ogy of globalization from the perspective ofthose most adversely affected by the impactsand transformations unleashed by global-ization It is also clear that they betray aWestern perspective although one which isconscious of the privilege and narrownessthat underwrites and supports it

First any phenomenology of globalizationwill have to begin with the descriptionanalysis and study of the exponential accel-eration of the production and disseminationof information Of course information is notknowledge Knowledge might be broadlydefined as ldquoa set of organized statements offacts or ideas presenting a reasoned judg-ment or an experimental result which istransmitted to others through some commu-nication medium rdquo (see Castells 1996 Vol1 p 17 n 27) Information on the other

hand presupposes knowledge and dataMore precisely information is the commu-nication of knowledge and data in such away that the latter has to be discriminatedfrom the former Data are made up of rawstatements and experimental results withoutthe reasoned judgment No one will deny theleaps in knowledge acquisition and informa-tion transmission that have taken place overthe last 50 years since the atom bomb wasfirst invented and exploded over desert atLos Alamos It is this glaring transformationof our knowledge of the world ourselves andthe cosmos in general that has incited someto call this the ldquoinformation agerdquo

If we follow Karl Jaspers as well asPierre Chaunu and Ferdinand Braudel wemight suggest that every major epochaltransformation in human consciousness wascatalysed by transformations in the meansof acquisition of knowledge and its com-munication through different media ortools of information The axial period ofwhich Jaspers spoke in his work on TheOrigin and Goal of History which tookplace between the 6th and 2nd centuriesbefore Christ had to do with the inventionof books the development of major citiesand the expansion of networks of economicexchange in terms of trade routes (Jaspers1953) At this time however paper andbooks were fragile expensive and to a largeextent tools of luxury and privilegeKnowledge of the world was guided bymythological world-views which were con-trolled by almost unassailable authoritiesThe 16th century another axial age wasmarked by the printing revolution inaugu-rated by Gutenberg the establishment ofnew trade routes and the secularization ofknowledge production and distributionwith the emergence of philosophers andintellectuals

The 20th century has marked yet anothershift in the way we produce and distributeknowledge and disseminate it as informa-tion One of the greatest unsung and neglec-ted triumphs of the 20th century has beenthe institutionalization of mass education

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 13

Many have been the horrors that havevisited cultures through their encounterwith the nation-state but one of the clearbenefits of this encounter has been thedevelopment of mass literacy and the estab-lishment of education institutions that are ifnot de facto at least nominally open to allcitizens of the state Talcott Parsons calledthis achievement of the nation-state theeducational revolution Amartya Sen forinstance has urged us to measure absolutepoverty in terms of the years of schoolingalong with access to potable water qualityof air and access to minimally nutritiousfood (Sen 1999) But this is only the leastnoticeable although perhaps the mostimportant aspect of the information revolu-tion of the 20th century The most notice-able is of course the computer and tele-communications revolutions Jeremy Rifkinhas appropriately suggested that we talk interms of the ldquobio-tech centuryrdquo and that weunderstand that the genetic computer andtelecommunications revolutions are differ-ent flanks of one same front the informa-tion revolution (Rifkin 1998) DNA wasdiscovered by Watson and Crick in 1953 in1990 the USA launched the Genome proj-ect by the turn of the third millennium theentire human genome plus the genetic makeup of the most important foods will becontrolled by a few multinationals (Daw-kins 1997) In the USA already over 25of the grain produced is genetically engi-neered Presently one of the most impor-tant conflicts between the USA and Europesince the deployment of missiles throughoutWestern Europe during the 1960s and 1980sis brewing over the import of geneticallyaltered produce and meats You might wantto call this bio-tech imperialism but youmay also call it the carrying out to itslogical conclusion of the ldquoagricultural revo-lutionrdquo (Shiva 1991 1997 1999) Similarlythe computer was invented during the1940s but only began to be mass producedin the 1970s Today any laptop has morecomputational power than all of the com-puters of the first generation put together

Micro-chips are superseded every 18months with each new cycle increasingexponentially the speed memory and con-centration of micro-processors In 1957 theRussians launched Sputnik the first artificialsatellite the Americans followed in 1962with the launching of Telstar 1 the firsttelevision satellite Today there are morethan 200 satellites forming a canopy ofelectric nodes linking the world in a net ofsynchronous telecommunications It is pro-jected that by the first decade of the nextmillennium there will be more than 300satellites (National Geographic 1999)

One of the fundamental characteristics ofthe modern world is that the extraction ofraw materials and their transformation intocommodities has been demoted from itsplace of privilige in bourgeois capitalism bythe production of scientific knowledge andits dissemination as information This is whatthe information revolution amounts tonamely the superseding of the industrialrevolution by the transformation both in themeans and object of production (Baudrillard1981 Lash and Urry 1994 Lowe 1995)Today what matters is not the raw materialand the possession of the means of produc-tion instead what matters is the knowledgethat allows one to discover even invent rawmaterials which are processed through ever-changing means of production The clearestexample of this is the bio-tech industrywhere Monsanto is the perfect illustration ofthe supervening of raw materials and meansof production by the production of knowl-edge that controls seeds and how they areprocessed (Lappe and Bailey 1998 Rifkin1998)

Second the acceleration of the productionand information dissemination has had adirect and evident impact on the way wethink about history and tradition The dura-bility and unifying role of our world-viewsor images of the world is a function of therelationship between our individual bodilyexperience of space and time and the way theworld surrounding us itself undergoeschange The world around us in turn is

14 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

made up of the social world and the naturalworld Each one has its own rhythms andtime (Kubler 1962 Elias 1992 Heidegger1992 Benford 1999) In light of this weshould speak of a biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time (Wal-lerstein 1991) Biomorphic space-time is theway space and time are experienced by theindividual The clock that measures thisspace-time might be said to be the biologicalclock of each human being Social space-timeis what social groups societies communitieslive and experience This space-time is meas-ured in generations historical processesevents the rise and fall of cities The motor ofthis space-time is the level of socio-technicaldevelopment of a society its infra-structuresand super-structures World space-time is thepace at which the natural world evolves andtransforms seasons come and go rivers runand dry up mountains erode plains dry upand become deserts and forests are cut downand grow up or turn into shrubbery andwasteland The further back we look in thehistory of humanity the more disjointed andseparate were the rhythms at which thesedifferent clocks ran and operated

Today there is a convergence of the speedsof these different space-times If we comparethe speed of world space-time and bio-morphic space-time we find that they arerunning almost simultaneously In otherwords the more our own life-spans arelengthened and world space-time the timeor speed at which the world itself changesshrinks the more unstable and local are ourworld-views or images of the world Cosmo-logical views as well as abstract universalitywere able to be sustained as long as the worlddid not seem not to change and humans hadsuch short life-spans that any substantivechange in the world was not noticeable andexperienceable by any two or three genera-tions Pierre Chaunu (1974) remarked thatone of the fundamental elements in thepossibility for the communication of knowl-edge was the lengthening of the life-spans ofhumans during and after the 16th centuryToday we have the convergence of unprece-

dented human life-spans (to the extent thatsome societies are registering the divergentvectors of the general ageing of their popula-tions and the lowering of infant mortalitywhere both are clearly a function of theimprovement in general medicine and itshaving been made more broadly available)with unprecedentedly accelerated worldchanges The latter is not simply a meremirage occasioned by almost synchronousworld communication It is the case that weare changing the face of the planet in waysthat not just generations but individuals areable to note and distinctly remember In thisway we can talk about the malleability oftradition and the arbitrariness of history Inother words what Harvey and Giddenscalled respectively the compression and col-lapse of space-time manifests itself in thecontemporary plurification of historicalmethodologies and re-narrativation of histo-ries as well as the skepticism that anyhistorical chronology is not a function ofsome ideological agenda Historical revisionhas become the daily bread of the historicallycynical masses of peoples who cannot read inhistory the telos of either emancipation orrationality In the age of globalization reasondoes not entail freedom nor revolution free-dom nor reason revolution In this way wecan say with Heelas Lash and Morris that welive in an post-traditional or de-tradition-alized world in which these notations thatgave cohesion and direction to the project ofmodernity have been superseded or ren-dered ideological and historicized (Heelas etal 1996)

Third any phenomenology of globaliza-tion must also begin with what I take to be anequally momentous transformation ofhuman societies and this has to do with themega-urbanization of the world We can saythat for most of its history most of humanityhas been rural Cities developed as append-ages to large agricultural areas Cities werefunctional principles of rural areas Even-tually this relationship reversed but onlyafter the city ceased to be a communicationnode for agricultural exchange Cities started

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 15

to acquire their independence when theycould produce their own commoditiesnamely knowledge and political power Thisonly began to happen after the Renaissancewhen major cities were not just ports but alsocentres of learning culture and politicalpower (Hall 1998) This trend howeveronly takes off when industrialization allowscities to become their own productive cen-tres even if they still remain tied to ruralcentres The reversal of the relationshipbetween rural and urban areas howeverbegan to shift in the 1950s during these yearsalready 30 of all humanity lived in citiesThe United Nations projects that by the year2005 50 of humanity will live in citiesHere we must pause and reflect that thismeans that a substantive part of humanitywill still remain rural and that most of thoselsquofarmersrsquo and lsquopeasantsrsquo will be in so-calledThird World countries Nonetheless as EricHobsbawn remarked in his work The Age ofExtremes the ldquomost dramatic and far-reach-ing social change of the second half of the[the twentieth century] is the death of thepeasantryrdquo (Hobsbawn 1994 p 289) Theother side of this reversal of the relationshipbetween city and country is that most mega-cities will be in what is called the ThirdWorld By the third millennium the 10 mostpopulated metropolises of the World will beneither in Europe nor in the USA

These trends can be attributed to a varietyof factors The most important factor in theelimination of the rural is the industrializa-tion of agriculture a process that reached itszenith with the so-called ldquogreen revolutionrdquoof the 1950s and 1960s Under the industrial-ization of agriculture we must understandnot just the introduction of better tools butthe homogenization of agricultural produc-tion by which I mean the introduction on aglobal scale of the mono-cultivo (Shiva1993) We must also include here the elimina-tion of self-subsistent forms of farmingthrough the elimination of self-renewing bio-diverse eco-systems One of the most effec-tive ways however in which the city hasimposed itself over the countryside is

through the projection of images that desta-bilized the sense of tradition and culturalcontinuity so fundamental to the rhythms ofthe countryside Through television radioand now the internet the city assaults thefabric of the countryside Tradition is under-mined by the promises and riches projectedby the tube of plenty the cornucopia of otherpossibilities the television and its world ofinfo-tainment (see Baumanrsquos wonderful dis-cussion of how under the globalization ofentertainment the Benthamian Panopticonturns into the MacWorldInfotainment Syn-opticon (1998a pp 53ndash54))

Indeed one of the most characteristicaspects of globalization is what is called thedecreasing importance of the local the statethe national We therefore need to speakwith Jurgen Habermas and Paul Kennedy ofa post-national constellation in which sover-eign nation-states as territorially localizedhave become less important less in controlof their own spatiality (Kennedy 1993Habermas 2001) But what is forgotten isthat there is a simultaneous process oflocalization in which place acquires a newsignificance certain spaces of course (Feath-erstone 1995) The city is the site at whichthe forces of the local and the global meetthe site where the forces of transnationalfinance capital and the local labour marketsand national infra-structures enter into con-flict and contestation over the city AsSaskia Sassen writes

ldquoThe city has indeed emerged as a site fornew claims by global capital which uses thecity as an lsquoorganizational commodityrsquo butalso by disadvantage sectors of the urbanpopulation which in large cities arefrequently as internationalized a presence asis capital The denationalizing of urbanspace and the formation of new claims bytransnational actors and involvingcontestation raise the questionmdashwhose cityis itrdquo (Sassen 1998 p xx)

The city in fact has become the crossroadfor new denationalizing politics in whichglobal actors capitals and moving peoples

16 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

enter into conflict across a transnationalurban system

Habermas has noted with acuity that oneof the characteristics of the 18th and 19thcenturies was their pronounced fears of theldquomassrdquo ldquothe crowdrdquo (Habermas 2001 p39) Such fears were summarized in the titleof the prescient work by Ortega y GassetThe Revolt of the Masses (1985) As wasnoted already the 18th and the 19th centuriessignalled the reversal of the relationshipbetween countryside and city This reversalmeant the rapid urbanization and demo-graphic explosion in cities which accompanythe rapid industrialization of certain metro-polises of the West London Berlin NewYork Chicago Newark Mexico City PortoAlegre and the non-West New DehliTokyo Beijing Cairo etc Urbanization andIndustrialization gave rise to the spectre ofthe irascible insatiable uncontrollable massthat would raze everything in its path Threeclassical responses emerged Sorel and thecelebration of the creative power of anar-chical and explosive unorganized mass mobi-lization the Marxist-Leninist and theattempt to domesticate and train the creativeand transformative power of social unrestthrough the development of a party machin-ery that would guide the ire and discontentof gathered masses of unemployed andemployed workers and the conservative andreactionary response of an Edmund Burkebut which is also echoed in the works ofphilosophers like Heidegger which dis-dained and vilified the common folk themass in a simple term Das Man The crowdthe mass is consumed and distracted byprattle and curiosity as it wallows in themiasma of inauthenticity and cowardness(Fritsche 1999)

Today such attitudes seem not just foreignbut also unrealistic Most of our experience isdetermined by a continuous mingling withcrowds and large undifferentiated masses ofpeople We get on the road and we areconfronted with traffic jams we get on thesubway and people accost and touch us fromall directions We live in continuous friction

with the stranger the other May we suggestthat the ldquoOtherrdquo has become such an impor-tant point of departure for philosophicalreflection precisely because we exist in such acontinuous propinquity with it Indeed theOther is no longer simply a phantasmagor-ical presence projected and barely discern-ible beyond the boundaries of the ecumenethe polis and the frontiers of the nation-stateAt the same time the discourse about theldquootherrdquo what is called the politics of alteritymarks a shift from the negative discourse ofanxiety and fear epitomized in the termldquoanomierdquo so well diagnosed by DurkheimSimmel and Freud and so aptly described byChristopher Lasch (1979) to the positivediscourse of solidarity inclusion acceptancetolerance citizenship and justice so welldiagnosed and described by Zymunt Bauman(1998b) Ulrich Beck (1997) Anthony Gid-dens (1990) and Jurgen Habermas (2001)

Are there any morals to be extracted fromthis profound transformation in the wayhumanity in general understands itself Forthe longest period of the history of human-kind groups remained both sheltered fromand inured to otherness by the solidity andstability of their traditions and their worldsCultures remained fairly segregated maps ofthe world in which the foreign strange andunknown was relegated beyond the bound-aries of the controllable and surveyable Tothis extent lsquoothernessrsquo was legislated over byreligion the state nature and even historynamely those centres of gravity of cultureand images of the world In an age in whichall traditions are under constant revision andhuman temporality converges with the age ofthe world itself then lsquoothernessrsquo appearsbefore us as naked unmediated otherness weare all others before each other In otherwords neither our sense of identity nor thesense of difference of the other are given apriori they are always discovered consti-tuted and dismantled in the very processes ofencounter The other was always constitutedfor us by extrinsic forces Now the other isconstituted in the very process of our iden-tity formation but in a contingent fashion

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 17

We make others as we make ourselves Thisreflection links up with some insights thatEnrique Dussel has had with respect to therelationship between the emergence of citiesand the development of the first codes ofethics the Hammurabi Code and the BookN of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Dussel1998) Such codes arose precisely becauseindividuals were thrown into the proximityof each other and were thus confronted witheach otherrsquos vulnerability and injurabilityThe injuction to take care of the poor theindigent the orphan the widow the invalidcould only arise out of the urban experienceof the contiguity with the injurable flesh ofthe stranger Today the experience of theindigent other is of the immigrant the exiledthe refugee who build their enclaves in theshadows of the glamorous city of transna-tional capital (King 1990 Sassen 1999) Forthis reason the other and the immigrant areinterchangeable but this also raises the issueof the new global city as a space for therepresentation and formation of post-colo-nial identities Geo-cities are spaces for thereconfiguration of image the imaginationand the imaginary as Arjun Appaduraiargued (1996) In this sense the centrality ofthe urban experience for humanity meansthat otherness is not going to be a meremetaphysical or even phenomenological cat-egory and concern Under the reign of thecity Otherness has become quotidian andpractical

Fourth another fundamental point ofdeparture for a phenomenology of global-ization will have to be the analysis of theplace of technology in our everyday lives Iwould like to understand technology in twosenses First in its broadest sense as ldquothe useof scientific knowledge to specify ways ofdoing things in a reproducible wayrdquo (Bell1976 p 29) Second as a prosthesis of thehuman body Technology to paraphrase awonderful aphorism of William Burroughsis the mind wanting more body I will discussfirst the former sense of technology as ascientific specification for the iterable way ofdoing things In this sense then a hospital is

a social technology like agriculture and cattleraising are material technologies By the sametoken prisons asylums and ghettos are socialtechnologies There is however somethingunique about technology in the 20th centuryand that is that technology itself has becomean object of technology in other words theuse of science in order to produce ever moreefficient ways of doing things in ever morereproducible ways itself has become a tech-nological quest This technology of technol-ogy is what one might call the institutional-ization of invention Alfred NorthWhitehead noted that ldquothe greatest inventionof the 19th century was the invention of themethod of inventionrdquo (Whitehead 1925 p141) What Whitehead attributes to the 19thcentury reached its true apogee in the secondhalf of the 20th century with the institu-tionalization of the research universityWhile the programme of the research uni-versity goes back to the German ideal of theuniversity it is in the USA that this ideagained its highest formalization and statesupport Without question we have to attrib-ute the greatest technological breakthroughsof the 20th century to this unique con-vergence of the state the military and theresearch university what Eisenhower calledthe militaryndashindustrial complex and whatwe now with hindsight should more appro-priately call the militaryndashuniversityndashindus-trial complex (Kenney 1986 Aronowitz2000)

The rise of the nation-state also signifiedthe rise of state-sponsored education and thestate university The university plays a dualrole On the one hand it has the function ofpreparing citizens and workers for the mate-rial and cultural-political self-reproductionof society On the other it has the role ofinstitutionalizing scientific investigation theinvention of invention Through the uni-versity the state invests in its future ability totransform its material technologies of self-reproduction Winning Nobel prizes is notjust a matter of pride it is above all aquestion of institutional power to supportimmense research budgets whose actual

18 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

industrial and technical application might befar off into the future This is one of thereasons why the USA has remained a worldpower despite its apparent military stale-mate namely because it still remains thecentre for the production of most techno-logical innovation

Related to the invention of invention whatI called the institutionalization of the tech-nology of technology as its other side is theinterpenetration of technology in everyaspect of our lives Even those who are notdirectly affected by technological revolutionsin their daily life are nonetheless indirectlyaffected insofar as their worlds economiesand cultures are made vulnerable to take-overs and colonization by those who drivethe technological revolutions of today Forthe longest period of the history of humanitytechnology remained distant from the livesand bodies of men and women not because itdid not impact them but because it did sosporadically and in such tangential ways firethe wheel the printing press the metalplough the steam engine the automobileEach technological innovation however hasmeant a further interpenetration betweentool and human body With this I turn to thediscussion of technology as prosthesis thesecond sense of technology I want to con-sider in light of a phenomenology ofglobalization

A technology is a way of doing things inways that can be reproduced again andagain and that therefore can be taught andpassed on Culture is in this sense the mostcomplex and important technology of all Inthis sense a technology is a way for asociety to extend itself across time fromgeneration to generation century to century(Giddens 1984 1987) A technology gen-erally instantiated itself in tools Tools allowparticular individuals to reach beyond theboundaries of their own bodies A tool is anextension of a particular bodily organ thataugments its original performance Tool andbody however have remained relatively dis-tinct even if one can claim that the hand isa product of our invention of tools

(Rothenberg 1993) Recognition of the dis-tinctness between tool and body does notentail the negation of their dialectical inter-dependence and co-modification Their dis-tinctness was sustained by what I havealready referred to above as the temporalityof humans and the time of the world Whenthe time of humans and the world convergewhat mediates their encounter tools hasalready fused with the body or has alreadymade the world immediate Our experienceof the world is already so mediated by ourtechnological tools that we cannot distin-guish the world from the tool and thesefrom the body We are our tools We are ourtechnological prosthesis because they arethe world (Brahm and Driscoll 1995) Butthis does not mean that technology is itselftransparent Rather technology itself hasbecome like our bodies in the sense that wedo not know how our livers hearts orbrains work we just assume that they willdo what they were designed to do and ifthey break down then we go to aspecialist

Everywhere we are surrounded by techno-logical devices which have insinuated them-selves in our lives and without which wecannot do the watch the telephone the carthe television but also toothpaste X-raysvaccines birth control pills condoms sunscreen eye-glasses shavers purified andchlorinated water and so on

What I am talking about can be illustratedby comparing Mary Shelleyrsquos Frankensteinin which a creation out of human partsbecomes monstrous precisely because itentails the complete instrumentalization ofour bodies and thus a sacrilage of its allegeddivine naturalness and Donna Harawayrsquosborgs which demonstrate and theorize towhat extent we are always already synthetic(Haraway 1991) There is no nature outsidethe confines of the laboratory Resistance isfutile to the logic of technology because weare all already borg we are products of ourtechnologies and nature exists only as anArcadian fantasy This reading should not betaken to be suggesting that nature does not

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 19

exist in the sense that it is a fiction the mirageof radical social constructivism Rather thepoint is to highlight the ways in which natureis to be thought of in terms of what today wecall the lsquorecursive loopsrsquo between technologyand nature in which nature is already anlsquoartefactrsquo and lsquomachinesrsquo are natural (Hayles1999) Indeed appropriating Marxrsquos languagefrom his 1844 manuscripts we have to talkabout the humanization of machines and themechanization of humanity

Is there a moral to be extracted by theinterpenetration of humans and their techno-logical prosthesis to the point that youcannot distinguish them any longer I wouldsay that a Heideggerian response to thisquestion is anachronistic and indefensibleOn the other hand a dia-mat in the sense ofEngelsrsquos dialectical materialism will not doeither Science is neither metaphysically badnor a malleable ideological epiphenomenonAgainst these two positions I would advo-cate what has been called Kranzbergrsquos lawwhich reads ldquotechnology is neither good norbad nor is it neutralrdquo (Castells 1996 Vol 1p 65)

I would like to summarize my reflectionsby suggesting that once a phenomenology ofglobalization takes seriously the points ofdeparture discussed above we will discoverthat globalization might stand for anotheraxial period This new axial age will becharacterized by at least these four themesfirst the perpetual revolutionizing of pro-duction technologies has turned into thetechnology of innovation in such a way thatthe generation of capital is relocated to theproduction of new information technologiesand not production and processing of rawmaterials Second because of the almostinstantaneous information transmission andreception across the world and the con-vergence of natural historical and personaltemporalities we have the effect of the de-transcendentalization and temporalization oftradition These de-transcendentalizationsand temporalizations suggest that our imagesof the world will be at the reach of our owndesign In this sense we will be able to speak

of the true secularization of the world and itscomplete humanization Third is the routini-zation and de-metaphysicalization of other-ness brought about by the hyper-urbaniza-tion of humanity Otherness will become aproduct of society and in this sense we willhave to talk of regimes of alterization Thelsquootherrsquo then will become a continuouspresence that will require our constant con-cern and vigilance Fourth is the dissolutionof the boundary between natural and syn-thetic body and tool technology and natureWe will have to speak then of the age inwhich humans have become their own crea-tions and in which the directions of thereproduction of both mind and body cultureand technology will become a concern ofpolitical practice of paramount importance

The image of the world projected byglobalization is one which collapses thedifferences between biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time whatwe see is what we get To put it in thelanguage of an essay by Theodor Adorno thehistory of nature is no different from thehistory of humanity (Adorno 1984) Global-ization also projects an image of the world inwhich otherness is not external and intract-able but produced from within Finallyglobalization is an image of the world inwhich the natural and the social the createdand uncreated have been brought togetherunder the insight that we have been produc-ing ourselves as we have been producingtools to alter the world Now however theproducing of our tools is not different fromthe production of ourselves and our worldIn the image of the world projected byglobalization the world is humanity lookingat itself through its eyes and not the eyes ofa god history or nature

III City of angels

ldquoWho is the observer when it concerns thequestion about the function of religion thesystem of religion itself or science as anexternal observerrdquo (Luhmann 2000 p 118)

20 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

The kind of phenomenology of globalizationthat I sketched above allows us to ask aboutthe kinds of challenges religion faces in anage of globalization For religion appears as aresource of images concepts traditions andpractices that can allow individuals andcommunities to deal with a world that ischanging around them by the hour (Robert-son and Garrett 1991 Luhmann 2000) Inthe new Unubersichtlichkeit [unsurveyabil-ity] of our global society religion appears ascompendium of intuitions that have not beenextinguished by the so-called process ofsecularization (Mendieta forthcoming a)Most importantly however religion cannotbe dismissed or derided because it is theprivileged if not the primary form in whichthe impoverished masses of the invisiblecities of the world (those cities to which Ipointed in the first part of this essay)articulate their hopes as well as critique theirworld

The first challenge to religion that ourphenomenology of globalization allow us toarticulate has to do with the lsquode-transcenden-talizing of othernessrsquo or what I also wouldlike to call the lsquoroutinization of othernessrsquoThere is a correlation between the wayhumanity has conceptualized otherness met-aphysically and conceptually on the onehand and humanityrsquos relationship to real andconcrete otherness as it has been experiencedexistentially and phenomenologically on theother hand This correlation has been medi-ated by humanityrsquos decreasing ruralism Inother words the less rural and thus the moreurban dwelling humans have become theless other is the otherness that we can thinkof or dream up The suggestion is that themetaphysics of alterity that has guided somuch of Western theology and religiousthinking over the last 2000 years has beendetermined by a particular asymmetrybetween the country and the city For thelongest history of humanity most societieshave been farming and rural-dwelling com-munities and associations Contact betweenextremely different communities and societ-ies was sporadic and rare and when contact

did occurred this was meditated by citydwellers and the long memory of popularmythologies But as was noted above in thedawning 21st century most humans will becity dwellers Furthermore In the 21st cen-tury most humanity will be conglomerated inthe mega-urbes of the Third World Underthis circumstance the holy other the abso-lutely other will be deflated Alterity and theextraordinary what can also be called thetremendum are de-mystified and de-met-aphysicalized (Habermas 1992 Placher1996) Either everyone will be a stranger orno one will be because we will all bestrangers in a city of strangers In such asituation otherness will have become a rou-tine an un-extra-ordinary event How thenare we to think divine alterity the othernessof the holy in a situation in which onto-logically and metaphysically all alterity hasbeen deflated demoted rendered normallevelled to the cotidian Are we in a situationof having to ldquorisk a new idea of holinessrdquo asBarry Taylor Pastor at the Sanctuary Churchin Santa Monica put it This would have tobe a holiness which is not other worldly buta holiness which is about the difference anduniqueness of others those who are oureveryday other with whom we ride thesubway with whom we walk the streets ofpopulated mega-urbes of the new age withwhom we share in anonymity the crowdedspaces of the new cities The real andmetaphorical wilderness of the world of itsjungles and forests of its undiscovered con-tinents and untamed seas of its unmappeddeserts and unnavigated rivers were excusesas well instigations to go searching for godbeyond the familial the urbane the too closeand already lsquodomesticatedrsquo God was beyondthe world other than the world Now thequestion is how do we discover the other inthe mundane difference of every fellowhuman being and the crowded city ofstrangers

The second challenge has to do with thecity as locus of the culture of consumptionas the site for an ethos of immediacyhedonism and hyper-excitation Sassen

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 21

speaks of the city as the crossroads of aconfrontation between the flows of capitaland the flows of peoples One of the waysthese flows clash in cities is through theconfrontation between cultures that isbetween different modalities of life Themore people become urban dwellers themore people are exposed to the cornucopiaof cultural possibilities It is not just thatmore people are in cities it is also that morepeople are seeking to participate in thestandards of life promised by urban dwellingThe challenges are unprecedented We arepresently choking in our own refuse in ourown garbage The psychological toil mustalso be unprecedented The level of unmetexpectations unfilled desires the gapbetween universally promised but exorbi-tantly expensive commodities that shatteredself-images and worth and that are availableto a relatively small fraction of the worldpopulation has grown exponentially Thereis another underside to the city as thecrossroads of the clash of modalities of lifeThe more cities grow the more they exerttheir pull on the so-called hinterland therural areas The more agriculture is mecha-nized and industrialized the more we adoptbiotechnology the more superfluous ldquofarm-ersrdquo become At the same time the expansionof telecommunications television and paidfor television and satellite connections havemade it easier to link up and peer into theldquotube of plentyrdquo to use that wonderfulphrase by Erik Barnouw (1990 [1975]) Thecity literally and metaphorically consumes itshinterland its outlying areas of supply itconsumes its resources and produce but alsoits cultures and its peoples

It is perhaps unnecessary to underscoreagain that most of the consumption of ruralresources is taking place in the metropolisesof the so-called First World So not onlymust we address the rampant and rapaciousconsumerism of cities in general but also theparticularly scandalous and grotesque asym-metry between the consumption of FirstWorld cities and Third World cities Thisissue becomes particularly pressing when in

the so-called advanced nations of the worldwe have thinkers intellectuals and criticstalking about a politics and culture of inclu-sion and tolerance (Habermas 1998) Thispolitics of inclusion is articulated with thebest intentions in mind The assumptionguiding it is that people throughout theworld would be better if they could partici-pate more equitably in the same kinds of so-called basic needs and luxuries that wewesterners enjoy But there is somethingprofoundly disingenuous and deleteriouslynaotildeve about such a view In some cases thepoverty of those across the world to whomwe would like to extend our standard ofliving is due precisely to our luxury Thatwhich we want to share is the cause of theprivation we want to alleviate Thus perhapsthe agenda should not be one of inclusionbut of dismantling the system that occa-sioned in the first place the exclusions webenefited and continue to benefit from

In this situation then the challengebecomes how to think of an urban culture offrugality The challenge is how to translatethe religious message and teaching of povertyas a holy way as a holy calling into a secularvalue a secular calling Another way ofputting it would be how do we translate thevisions of the desert fathers St Francis ofAssisi Mohandas Gandhi into an urbanvision for a spiritually starving youth Oralternatively if we think of what ArnoldToynbee and Eric Hobsbawn said about the20th century namely that its greatestachievement was the expansion of the middleclass then the goal for the 21st centuryshould be the expansion of a globalizedldquoliving level classrdquo In other words we haveto develop a culture for which the greatestachievement is not that everyone else will livelike us but that we will live at the level thatallows the most people to share in the mostfundamental goods potable water clean airinfant nutrition to sustain healthy standardsof unstunted growth and the possibility ofbasic education Here I would have to saythat I concur with Hardt and Negri on theircanonization of Assisi as a saint in the

22 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

hagiography of revolutionary militancy(2000 p 413)

The third challenge that our phenomenol-ogy of globalization allows us to elucidate hasto do with one of its central locus of analysisnamely the city If cities have become the siteswhere the unbundling of the state takes placethat is if we take cities to be the sites for thede-nationalizing of the national and if we atthe same time take the city as the locus of anemergent juridification or process of legal-ization of new forms of relationships then arewe not in need of having to re-think therelationship between the legal and politicalstructures of the emergent supra-nationalstate and the para- or extra-statist ldquochurchrdquoAnother way of putting it would be to notethat the church at least in the West antecedesthe modern nation-state In fact the churchwas the state and that partly because of thisthe quest for modernity the process ofmodernization entailed a secularization ofstate and legal structures In the process thechurchrsquos sphere of operation becamerestricted or constrained by the spaces drawnby the boundaries of nation-states Churchesand denominations became identified withnational boundaries which took place not-withstanding the underlying and fundamentaluniversalist thrust of Christianity If weaccept Sassenrsquos analysis which we must giventhe overwhelming evidence then we areinescapably put in the situation of having tore-think the relationship between the churchand the state In fact as the nation-states of the19th and 20th century are unbundled andnew forms of political and legal rights emergein de-territorialized and de-nationalizedforms of political self-determination then thechurch itself will have to face its de-national-ization and de-territorialization At the sametime however one of the fundamental condi-tions of the presence of the church in the 21stcentury will have to be that it must havelearned the lessons of the last 500 years ofcolonialism imperialism and post-colonial-ism This means that the challenge is dual Onthe one hand the new church must find aplace beyond the nation-states of political

modernity but on the other hand it must doso with a post-colonialist and post-imperialistattitude In the age of global transformationsthe new church cannot and will not be able toserve as an agent of globalization for the newimperial masters that began to profile them-selves in the horizon namely a united front ofEuropean nations (an expanded NATO) atechnological elite bent on re-designingnature and a cosmopolitan nobility withoutcontrols allegiances or consciences

Fourth and finally I think that anotherextremely important challenge has to do withthe insight that cities are the places wherecultures come to cultivate each other Inother words cities are the places where oldcultures are cannibalized but also carniv-alized where old cultures which are dyingcome to be renewed but also where newcultures are produced from the remains ofold ones (Hamacher 1997) Cities are germi-nals of new cultures Indeed just as we arevery likely to find micro-climates in mostglobal cities we are likely to find culturalenclaves little Italys Chinatowns Japan-towns little Bombays etc These places arewhere the centripetal and centrifugal forcesof homogenization and heterogenizationinteract to produce new cultural formationsUnderlying this new cultural genesis is itsevident and almost presentist character Theprocesses of cultural genesis take place rightin front of our eyes Cultures are notmillennial sedimentations and even thatwhich is peddled as the oldest is a present-day version of the old Most importantlycultures have become something we produceand choose cultures are something which weeither nurture and preserve or abandon anddisavow In all of these cases we are notpassive but active agents of transformationIn this situation the challenge for the newchurch for an urban ministry for the 21stcentury is how to develop an ecclesiology ofcultural diversity How will the new churchparticipate in this cultural genesis that isgerminating in global cities while retaining asense of identity Or conversely how will itretain a sense of cultural identity without

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 23

becoming either ethnocentric or jingoisticabout its cultural bequest without contribut-ing to the ossification of its own culture Onwhat terms can the new church participate inthe creation of new cultures and the preser-vation of successful ones

Conclusion

Cities are the vortex of the convergence ofthe processes of globalization and local-ization Cities are epitomes of glocalizationto use Robertsonrsquos language (1994) They arealso sites of the sedimentation of history Inthis essay I have sough to advance theresearch agenda that would take the ldquoinvisi-ble citiesrdquo of the so-called Third World astheir primary object of analysis At the sametime however I have urged that we look atthe cities in the developed industrializedworld through the eyes of their invisibleinhabitants and citizens immigrants ethnicminorities disenfranchised groups workerswomen and the youth There are invisiblecities within the cities that are so visible inmost urban theory and analysis as well asinvisible cities that remain unseen becausethey are not on the horizon of the academicagendas of researchers in the universities ofthe developed world

In tandem I have suspended judgementon whether to be for or against global-ization not because I do not think that wecan make moral judgments in this case butbecause I think we need to broaden ouranalyses of this new order of things Ideveloped some general points of departurefor a phenomenological analysis of global-ization This particular approach I thinkexhibits how ldquoglobalizationrdquo can and oughtto become a matter for serious philosophicalreflection I have identified the issues ofalterity temporality tradition the distinc-tion between the natural and the syntheticas philosophemes that are substantivelyimpacted by the processes of globalizationYet the phenomenological approach Iarticulate is deliberate in assuming a partic-

ular perspective or angle of approach I havesought to delineate a phenomenology ofglobalization from below The world doesnot disclose itself in the same way to allsubjects much less globalization Thus thephenomenology here presented urges us tolook at the world from below from theperspective of those who seem to be moreadversely than beneficially affected by theprocesses that make up globalization

This is what the ldquobelowrdquo in the subtitle ofthe essay pointed to the below of the poorand destitute the below of those who are notseen and do not register in the radar of socialtheory Furthermore I have tried to furtherqualify that perspective from below byfocusing my attention on the issue of reli-gion Religion clearly can mean manythings but at the very least it means ldquothe sighof the oppressedrdquo and the ldquoencyclopediccompendiumrdquo of a heartless world as Marxput it (1994 p 28) if only because it is theform in which the destitute the most vulner-able in our world express their critiques aswell as hopes I have argued that we ought tolook at cities as germinals of new culturesand that if we want to trace the emergentcultures of those ldquobelowrdquo then we betterlook at religious movements In what waysare the religious language of the oppressedand disenfranchised of the invisible cities ofglobalization critiques and resistances toglobalization This is clearly a researchdesideratum rather than a description oreven assessment

Note

1 I want to thank Bob Catterall for encouraging me towrite this article and for his comments on earlyversions of it I also want to thank Lois AnnLorentzen and Nelson Maldonado Torres who readit with great care and made substantive suggestionscorrections and criticisms that have made meunderstand better my own project I also want tothank Enrique Dussel Jurgen Habermas WalterMignolo and Santiago Castro-Gomez with whom Ihave discussed many of the ideas here developedand who have given me impetus to continue alongthis line with their own pioneering works

24 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Bibliography

Adorno TW (1984) lsquoThe idea of natural historyrsquo Telos60 pp 31ndash42

Amin S (1996) Capitalism in the Age of GlobalizationThe Management of Contemporary Society Londonand New York Zed Books

Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large CulturalDimensions of Globalization MinneapolisUniversity of Minnesota Press

Appiah KA (1992) In My Fatherrsquos House Africa in thePhilosophy of Culture New York Oxford UniversityPress

Aronowitz S (2000) The Knowledge FactoryDismantling the Corporate University and CreatingTrue Higher Learning Boston Beacon Press

Barber BR (1995) Jihad vs McWorld How Globalismand Tribalism are Reshaping the World New YorkBallantine Books

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1993) lsquoA globalizingeconomy some implications and consequencesrsquo inB Mazlish and R Buultjens (eds) ConceptualizingGlobal History pp 153ndash172 Boulder COWestview Press

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1994) Global DreamsImperial Corporations and the New World OrderNew York Simon amp Schuster

Barnouw E (1990 [1975]) Tube of Plenty TheEvolution of American Television New YorkOxford University Press

Baudrillard J (1981) For a Critique of the PoliticalEconomy of the Sign St Louis MO Telos Press

Bauman Z (1998a) Globalization The HumanConsequences New York Columbia UniversityPress

Bauman Z (1998b) lsquoPostmodern religionrsquo in P Heelas(ed) Religion Modernity and PostmodernityCambridge Blackwell

Beck U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung Frankfurt amMain Suhrkamp

Bell D (1976) The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism New York Basic Books

Benford G (1999) Deep Time How HumanityCommunicates Across Millenia New York AvonBooks Inc

Beyer P (1994) Religion and Globalization LondonSage

Brahm Jr G and Driscoll M (eds) (1995) ProstheticTerritories Politics and Hypertechnologies BoulderCO Westview

Bretherton C and Ponton G (eds) (1996) GlobalPolitics An Introduction Cambridge Blackwell

Calvino I (1974) Invisible Cities New York HarcourtBrace Jovanovich

Casanova J (1994) Public Religions in the ModernWorld Chicago University of Chicago Press

Castells M (1996ndash8) The Information Age EconomySociety and Culture Vol 1 The Rise of the

Network Society Vol 2 The Power of Identity Vol3 End of Millenium Malden MA and OxfordBlackwell Publishers

Chaunu P (1974) Historie science sociale la dureelrsquoespace et lrsquohomme a lrsquoepoque moderne ParisSociete drsquoedition drsquoenseignement superieur

Clark RP (1997) The Global Imperative AnInterpretative History of the Spread of HumankindBoulder CO Westview Press

Costello P (1993) World Historians and Their GoalsTwentieth-century Answers to Modernism DeKalbNorthern Illinois University Press

Dawkins K (1997) Gene Wars The Politics ofBiotechnology New York Seven Stories Press

de Benoist A (1996) lsquoConfronting globalizationrsquo Telos108 pp 117ndash137

Dussel E (1998) Etica de la Liberacion en la edad deglobalizacion y de la exclusion Madrid EditorialTrotta

Elias N (1992) Time An Essay Cambridge MA BasilBlackwell

Featherstone M (1995) Undoing CultureGlobalization Postmodernism and Identity LondonSage Publications

Fritsche J (1999) Historical Destiny and NationalSocialism in Heideggerrsquos Being and Time Berkeleyand Los Angeles University of California Press

Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of SocietyCambridge Polity Press

Giddens A (1987) Social Theory and ModernSociology Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of ModernityCambridge Polity Press

Gray J (1998) False Dawn The Delusions of GlobalCapitalism London Granta Books

Grossberg L (1999) lsquoSpeculations and articulations ofglobalizationrsquo Polygraph 11 pp 11ndash48

Habermas J (1992) Postmetaphysical ThinkingPhilosophical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (1998) The Inclusion of the Other Studiesin Political Theory Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (2001) The Postnational ConstellationPolitical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Hall Sir Peter (1998) Cities in Civilization New YorkPantheon Books

Hamacher W (1997) lsquoOne 2 many multiculturalismsrsquoin H de Vries and S Weber (eds) ViolenceIdentity and Self-determination Stanford CAStanford University Press

Haraway D (1991) Simians Cyborgs and WomenThe Reinvention of Nature New York Routledge

Hardt M and Negri A (2000) Empire CambridgeMA Harvard University Press

Harvey D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity AnEnquiry into the Origins of Cultural ChangeCambridge MA Basil Blackwell

Hayles NK (1999) How we Became PosthumanVirtual Bodies in Cybernetics Literature and

10 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Nonetheless I will suggest that there is noway in which we can understand what ishappening to the world to our societies toour environments to the seas to the airaround the entire planet and so on if we donot look at three related factors the unprec-edented concentration of humans in citiesthe growth of the human population and theincrease in certain forms of consumptionLet me cite a few statistics At the turn of the20th century 150 million people lived incities that is about one-tenth of the worldpopulation were city dwellers In contrastsby 2006 basically now it is estimated that32 billion people will live in cities which isa 20-fold increase (OrsquoMeara 1999 p 5)What this means is that for the first time inthe history of our species we have finallybegun to be predominantly city dwellersBut this is not the whole story While the19th and 20th centuries were the centuries ofthe great industrial metropolis of the so-called advanced world the so-called modernworld the cities of the 21st century will bethe cities of the developing world the so-called Third World the purportedly not-yetmodern world Note for instance that someof the largest cities today are in the southernsection of the geopolitical map Mexico City181 million Bombay 180 Sao Paulo 177Shanghai 142 Seoul 129 (State of theWorldrsquos Cities 1999)

In short the largest urbanizing areas of theplanet are those areas that are most vulner-able and perhaps least ready to assume thechallenges of massive concentrations of peo-ple in their already over-stretched urbancentres Let me be more specific While moreand more people migrate to cities in the so-called industrializing nations the disparitiesbetween the developed and the developingworld continues to grow Let me cite theHuman Development Report of 1998Twenty per cent of the worldrsquos people in thehighest income countries account for 86 oftotal private consumption while the poorest20 account for a minimal 13 Let me justnote also that the richest fifth (living in theinformation cities that Sassen studies)

d consume 58 of total energy while thepoorest fifth less that 4

d have 74 of all telephone lines thepoorest fifth 15

d consume 84 of all paper the poorestfifth 15

d own 87 of the worldrsquos vehicle fleet thepoorest fifth less that 1 (United NationsDevelopment Programme 1998 pp2ndash4)

To these ratios and statistics we would haveto add the telling statistics of the actualnumber of people who have computers accessto an internet connection wireless connec-tions and electricity Couple these abysmallyasymmetrical levels of consumption and own-ership with the fact that the fifth of worldpopulation in the wealthiest countries (USACanada Germany Japan France UK)account for 53 of carbon dioxide emissionswhile the poorest fifth for only 30

This all paints an apocalyptic picture adoomsday scenario not unlike that so pro-phetically captured by Ridley Scott in hisfilm Blade Runner which projects an anar-chical urban bazaar teeming with massesfrom all corners of the world speaking somepost-Babelian pidgin ever in the shadow ofdark clouds that conceal a fading sun alwaysbathed in radioactive rain

I would like now to turn to the secondaspect of my thematization of some aspectsof Sassenrsquos work Her analysis at least as it isreproduced here seems to leave open theway for an interpretation that would seeglobal financial interests global capital aspossessing the same type of leverage ashuman global actors have If we see the cityas a strategic site for the deployment ofdenationalizing and re-territorializing pro-cesses and contestations does this mean thatall agents are on the same level Is this newtopology of power characterized by a lev-elled plain And here I would have to sayno In other words it is not the case that theglobalizing that is operated and executed byglobal financial networks is of the samecharacter and extent as that which is enacted

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 11

by immigrants and women of colour tomention the actors Sassen mentions

I will go a step forward and focus on theUSA Home to at least four of the mostimportant megapolises in the circuits oftechnology information finance capital aswell as immigration and urban oppositionalpolitics from below (New York ChicagoLos Angeles and Miami) the USA has had along history of bias against cities Thesebiases are built into the tax structures at thefederal and local levels They are built into thevery policies of the Welfare State and theallocation of national wealth through devel-opment grants tax incentives brakes grantsand loans etc A whole series of factors hasbuilt a complex web of legal and tax codesinfra-structure construction developmentincentives etc that adversely affects the coreareas of cities and which simultaneouslyrewards urban sprawl privatization highwayconstruction and urban capital flight In briefin the USA at least very clearly and con-certedly since the end of World War IIhousing taxing educational highway con-structions policies etc have conspired toproduce the hollowing of cities and theexpansion of a socially wasteful and eco-logically devastating urban sprawl The majorinfo-megapolises of the New Brave World ofsurreal wealth are oases of grotesque luxuryin the midst of vast deserts of povertycrumbling infra-structure rusting bridgesbroken public phones poor and unsuitablepublic schools and the litany can go Thislogic of urban development in the USA hasbeen a luxury that can only be bought at theexpense of the asymmetries which I pointedout earlier And here I would like to referpeople to the work of Daniel D Luria andJoel Rogers on a new urban politics for the21st century (Jackson 1985 Massey andDenton 1993 Luria and Rogers 1999)

The point however that I am trying toelaborate is the following It is simply not thecase that different actors enter the territoryof the global city on the same level In fact itis a territory that is already organized in sucha way as to preclude certain agents from

confronting from elaborating their rights tothe city with the same level of force andefficacy that transnationals enact and enforcetheir claims on urban space My questionthen would be how do we develop ananalysis that takes into account the unlev-elled terrain that constitutes the new topol-ogy of power in which certain actors aremore clearly at a disadvantage than othersWhat new forms of legitimacy and politicscan we appeal to or begin to configure whenurban dwellers find themselves historicallycondemned to always stand in a substan-tively adverse situation of economic polit-ical and legal power vis-a-vis the sub-stantively effective legal financial andpolitical forces of globalizing finance capitalIn what way in short can we begin toelaborate a politics of the right to the city touse that felicitous phrase of Henri Lefebvrewhich unquestionably will become the num-ber one form of politics in this age of mega-cities and hyper-urbanization from thestandpoint of those who have been histor-ically excluded from exercising their rights totheir cities (Lefebvre 1969)

II A phenomenology of globalization

ldquoThe expression lsquophenomenologyrsquo can beformulated in Greek as legein taphainomena But legein meansapophainesthai Hence phenomenologymeans apophphainesthai taphainomena mdashto let what shows itself beseen from itself just as it shows itself fromitself That is the formal meaning of thetype of research that call itselflsquophenomenologyrsquo But this expressesnothing other than the maxim formulatedabove lsquoTo the things themselvesrsquo rdquo(Heidegger 1996 p 30)

I turn now to the presentation of what I calla phenomenology of globalization By aphenomenology of globalization I under-stand the analysis of those experiences thathuman beings in varying degrees are under-going as a result of new socio-economic-

12 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

cultural and political processes which in turncondition the horizon of all possible expecta-tions against which new experiences arepossible at all

Human experience happens against a spa-tio-temporal background the life-world Atthe same time human experience projectsitself forward into a horizon of expectationsthat is conditioned by the structures of thelife-world Human experience therefore isalways framed or structured by spatial andtemporal co-ordinates Ideas of the world orworld-views are coagulations of those spa-tio-temporal configurations (Giddens 19841987) Images of the world or world-imagesare ways in which we understand our rela-tionships to space and time For this reasonthe way we conceptualize the world imaginethe world mirrors the way we conceptualizeourselves as humans The point of thesereflections is to begin to think of global-ization as a way of viewing the world as animage of the world (Heidegger 1977) And tothis extent then globalization acquires aphilosophical status that requires a phenom-enological analysis (Jameson 1998)

In the following I would like to describewhat I take to be fundamental elements of aphenomenology of globalization I discussfour points of departure for a phenomenol-ogy of globalization from the perspective ofthose most adversely affected by the impactsand transformations unleashed by global-ization It is also clear that they betray aWestern perspective although one which isconscious of the privilege and narrownessthat underwrites and supports it

First any phenomenology of globalizationwill have to begin with the descriptionanalysis and study of the exponential accel-eration of the production and disseminationof information Of course information is notknowledge Knowledge might be broadlydefined as ldquoa set of organized statements offacts or ideas presenting a reasoned judg-ment or an experimental result which istransmitted to others through some commu-nication medium rdquo (see Castells 1996 Vol1 p 17 n 27) Information on the other

hand presupposes knowledge and dataMore precisely information is the commu-nication of knowledge and data in such away that the latter has to be discriminatedfrom the former Data are made up of rawstatements and experimental results withoutthe reasoned judgment No one will deny theleaps in knowledge acquisition and informa-tion transmission that have taken place overthe last 50 years since the atom bomb wasfirst invented and exploded over desert atLos Alamos It is this glaring transformationof our knowledge of the world ourselves andthe cosmos in general that has incited someto call this the ldquoinformation agerdquo

If we follow Karl Jaspers as well asPierre Chaunu and Ferdinand Braudel wemight suggest that every major epochaltransformation in human consciousness wascatalysed by transformations in the meansof acquisition of knowledge and its com-munication through different media ortools of information The axial period ofwhich Jaspers spoke in his work on TheOrigin and Goal of History which tookplace between the 6th and 2nd centuriesbefore Christ had to do with the inventionof books the development of major citiesand the expansion of networks of economicexchange in terms of trade routes (Jaspers1953) At this time however paper andbooks were fragile expensive and to a largeextent tools of luxury and privilegeKnowledge of the world was guided bymythological world-views which were con-trolled by almost unassailable authoritiesThe 16th century another axial age wasmarked by the printing revolution inaugu-rated by Gutenberg the establishment ofnew trade routes and the secularization ofknowledge production and distributionwith the emergence of philosophers andintellectuals

The 20th century has marked yet anothershift in the way we produce and distributeknowledge and disseminate it as informa-tion One of the greatest unsung and neglec-ted triumphs of the 20th century has beenthe institutionalization of mass education

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 13

Many have been the horrors that havevisited cultures through their encounterwith the nation-state but one of the clearbenefits of this encounter has been thedevelopment of mass literacy and the estab-lishment of education institutions that are ifnot de facto at least nominally open to allcitizens of the state Talcott Parsons calledthis achievement of the nation-state theeducational revolution Amartya Sen forinstance has urged us to measure absolutepoverty in terms of the years of schoolingalong with access to potable water qualityof air and access to minimally nutritiousfood (Sen 1999) But this is only the leastnoticeable although perhaps the mostimportant aspect of the information revolu-tion of the 20th century The most notice-able is of course the computer and tele-communications revolutions Jeremy Rifkinhas appropriately suggested that we talk interms of the ldquobio-tech centuryrdquo and that weunderstand that the genetic computer andtelecommunications revolutions are differ-ent flanks of one same front the informa-tion revolution (Rifkin 1998) DNA wasdiscovered by Watson and Crick in 1953 in1990 the USA launched the Genome proj-ect by the turn of the third millennium theentire human genome plus the genetic makeup of the most important foods will becontrolled by a few multinationals (Daw-kins 1997) In the USA already over 25of the grain produced is genetically engi-neered Presently one of the most impor-tant conflicts between the USA and Europesince the deployment of missiles throughoutWestern Europe during the 1960s and 1980sis brewing over the import of geneticallyaltered produce and meats You might wantto call this bio-tech imperialism but youmay also call it the carrying out to itslogical conclusion of the ldquoagricultural revo-lutionrdquo (Shiva 1991 1997 1999) Similarlythe computer was invented during the1940s but only began to be mass producedin the 1970s Today any laptop has morecomputational power than all of the com-puters of the first generation put together

Micro-chips are superseded every 18months with each new cycle increasingexponentially the speed memory and con-centration of micro-processors In 1957 theRussians launched Sputnik the first artificialsatellite the Americans followed in 1962with the launching of Telstar 1 the firsttelevision satellite Today there are morethan 200 satellites forming a canopy ofelectric nodes linking the world in a net ofsynchronous telecommunications It is pro-jected that by the first decade of the nextmillennium there will be more than 300satellites (National Geographic 1999)

One of the fundamental characteristics ofthe modern world is that the extraction ofraw materials and their transformation intocommodities has been demoted from itsplace of privilige in bourgeois capitalism bythe production of scientific knowledge andits dissemination as information This is whatthe information revolution amounts tonamely the superseding of the industrialrevolution by the transformation both in themeans and object of production (Baudrillard1981 Lash and Urry 1994 Lowe 1995)Today what matters is not the raw materialand the possession of the means of produc-tion instead what matters is the knowledgethat allows one to discover even invent rawmaterials which are processed through ever-changing means of production The clearestexample of this is the bio-tech industrywhere Monsanto is the perfect illustration ofthe supervening of raw materials and meansof production by the production of knowl-edge that controls seeds and how they areprocessed (Lappe and Bailey 1998 Rifkin1998)

Second the acceleration of the productionand information dissemination has had adirect and evident impact on the way wethink about history and tradition The dura-bility and unifying role of our world-viewsor images of the world is a function of therelationship between our individual bodilyexperience of space and time and the way theworld surrounding us itself undergoeschange The world around us in turn is

14 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

made up of the social world and the naturalworld Each one has its own rhythms andtime (Kubler 1962 Elias 1992 Heidegger1992 Benford 1999) In light of this weshould speak of a biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time (Wal-lerstein 1991) Biomorphic space-time is theway space and time are experienced by theindividual The clock that measures thisspace-time might be said to be the biologicalclock of each human being Social space-timeis what social groups societies communitieslive and experience This space-time is meas-ured in generations historical processesevents the rise and fall of cities The motor ofthis space-time is the level of socio-technicaldevelopment of a society its infra-structuresand super-structures World space-time is thepace at which the natural world evolves andtransforms seasons come and go rivers runand dry up mountains erode plains dry upand become deserts and forests are cut downand grow up or turn into shrubbery andwasteland The further back we look in thehistory of humanity the more disjointed andseparate were the rhythms at which thesedifferent clocks ran and operated

Today there is a convergence of the speedsof these different space-times If we comparethe speed of world space-time and bio-morphic space-time we find that they arerunning almost simultaneously In otherwords the more our own life-spans arelengthened and world space-time the timeor speed at which the world itself changesshrinks the more unstable and local are ourworld-views or images of the world Cosmo-logical views as well as abstract universalitywere able to be sustained as long as the worlddid not seem not to change and humans hadsuch short life-spans that any substantivechange in the world was not noticeable andexperienceable by any two or three genera-tions Pierre Chaunu (1974) remarked thatone of the fundamental elements in thepossibility for the communication of knowl-edge was the lengthening of the life-spans ofhumans during and after the 16th centuryToday we have the convergence of unprece-

dented human life-spans (to the extent thatsome societies are registering the divergentvectors of the general ageing of their popula-tions and the lowering of infant mortalitywhere both are clearly a function of theimprovement in general medicine and itshaving been made more broadly available)with unprecedentedly accelerated worldchanges The latter is not simply a meremirage occasioned by almost synchronousworld communication It is the case that weare changing the face of the planet in waysthat not just generations but individuals areable to note and distinctly remember In thisway we can talk about the malleability oftradition and the arbitrariness of history Inother words what Harvey and Giddenscalled respectively the compression and col-lapse of space-time manifests itself in thecontemporary plurification of historicalmethodologies and re-narrativation of histo-ries as well as the skepticism that anyhistorical chronology is not a function ofsome ideological agenda Historical revisionhas become the daily bread of the historicallycynical masses of peoples who cannot read inhistory the telos of either emancipation orrationality In the age of globalization reasondoes not entail freedom nor revolution free-dom nor reason revolution In this way wecan say with Heelas Lash and Morris that welive in an post-traditional or de-tradition-alized world in which these notations thatgave cohesion and direction to the project ofmodernity have been superseded or ren-dered ideological and historicized (Heelas etal 1996)

Third any phenomenology of globaliza-tion must also begin with what I take to be anequally momentous transformation ofhuman societies and this has to do with themega-urbanization of the world We can saythat for most of its history most of humanityhas been rural Cities developed as append-ages to large agricultural areas Cities werefunctional principles of rural areas Even-tually this relationship reversed but onlyafter the city ceased to be a communicationnode for agricultural exchange Cities started

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 15

to acquire their independence when theycould produce their own commoditiesnamely knowledge and political power Thisonly began to happen after the Renaissancewhen major cities were not just ports but alsocentres of learning culture and politicalpower (Hall 1998) This trend howeveronly takes off when industrialization allowscities to become their own productive cen-tres even if they still remain tied to ruralcentres The reversal of the relationshipbetween rural and urban areas howeverbegan to shift in the 1950s during these yearsalready 30 of all humanity lived in citiesThe United Nations projects that by the year2005 50 of humanity will live in citiesHere we must pause and reflect that thismeans that a substantive part of humanitywill still remain rural and that most of thoselsquofarmersrsquo and lsquopeasantsrsquo will be in so-calledThird World countries Nonetheless as EricHobsbawn remarked in his work The Age ofExtremes the ldquomost dramatic and far-reach-ing social change of the second half of the[the twentieth century] is the death of thepeasantryrdquo (Hobsbawn 1994 p 289) Theother side of this reversal of the relationshipbetween city and country is that most mega-cities will be in what is called the ThirdWorld By the third millennium the 10 mostpopulated metropolises of the World will beneither in Europe nor in the USA

These trends can be attributed to a varietyof factors The most important factor in theelimination of the rural is the industrializa-tion of agriculture a process that reached itszenith with the so-called ldquogreen revolutionrdquoof the 1950s and 1960s Under the industrial-ization of agriculture we must understandnot just the introduction of better tools butthe homogenization of agricultural produc-tion by which I mean the introduction on aglobal scale of the mono-cultivo (Shiva1993) We must also include here the elimina-tion of self-subsistent forms of farmingthrough the elimination of self-renewing bio-diverse eco-systems One of the most effec-tive ways however in which the city hasimposed itself over the countryside is

through the projection of images that desta-bilized the sense of tradition and culturalcontinuity so fundamental to the rhythms ofthe countryside Through television radioand now the internet the city assaults thefabric of the countryside Tradition is under-mined by the promises and riches projectedby the tube of plenty the cornucopia of otherpossibilities the television and its world ofinfo-tainment (see Baumanrsquos wonderful dis-cussion of how under the globalization ofentertainment the Benthamian Panopticonturns into the MacWorldInfotainment Syn-opticon (1998a pp 53ndash54))

Indeed one of the most characteristicaspects of globalization is what is called thedecreasing importance of the local the statethe national We therefore need to speakwith Jurgen Habermas and Paul Kennedy ofa post-national constellation in which sover-eign nation-states as territorially localizedhave become less important less in controlof their own spatiality (Kennedy 1993Habermas 2001) But what is forgotten isthat there is a simultaneous process oflocalization in which place acquires a newsignificance certain spaces of course (Feath-erstone 1995) The city is the site at whichthe forces of the local and the global meetthe site where the forces of transnationalfinance capital and the local labour marketsand national infra-structures enter into con-flict and contestation over the city AsSaskia Sassen writes

ldquoThe city has indeed emerged as a site fornew claims by global capital which uses thecity as an lsquoorganizational commodityrsquo butalso by disadvantage sectors of the urbanpopulation which in large cities arefrequently as internationalized a presence asis capital The denationalizing of urbanspace and the formation of new claims bytransnational actors and involvingcontestation raise the questionmdashwhose cityis itrdquo (Sassen 1998 p xx)

The city in fact has become the crossroadfor new denationalizing politics in whichglobal actors capitals and moving peoples

16 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

enter into conflict across a transnationalurban system

Habermas has noted with acuity that oneof the characteristics of the 18th and 19thcenturies was their pronounced fears of theldquomassrdquo ldquothe crowdrdquo (Habermas 2001 p39) Such fears were summarized in the titleof the prescient work by Ortega y GassetThe Revolt of the Masses (1985) As wasnoted already the 18th and the 19th centuriessignalled the reversal of the relationshipbetween countryside and city This reversalmeant the rapid urbanization and demo-graphic explosion in cities which accompanythe rapid industrialization of certain metro-polises of the West London Berlin NewYork Chicago Newark Mexico City PortoAlegre and the non-West New DehliTokyo Beijing Cairo etc Urbanization andIndustrialization gave rise to the spectre ofthe irascible insatiable uncontrollable massthat would raze everything in its path Threeclassical responses emerged Sorel and thecelebration of the creative power of anar-chical and explosive unorganized mass mobi-lization the Marxist-Leninist and theattempt to domesticate and train the creativeand transformative power of social unrestthrough the development of a party machin-ery that would guide the ire and discontentof gathered masses of unemployed andemployed workers and the conservative andreactionary response of an Edmund Burkebut which is also echoed in the works ofphilosophers like Heidegger which dis-dained and vilified the common folk themass in a simple term Das Man The crowdthe mass is consumed and distracted byprattle and curiosity as it wallows in themiasma of inauthenticity and cowardness(Fritsche 1999)

Today such attitudes seem not just foreignbut also unrealistic Most of our experience isdetermined by a continuous mingling withcrowds and large undifferentiated masses ofpeople We get on the road and we areconfronted with traffic jams we get on thesubway and people accost and touch us fromall directions We live in continuous friction

with the stranger the other May we suggestthat the ldquoOtherrdquo has become such an impor-tant point of departure for philosophicalreflection precisely because we exist in such acontinuous propinquity with it Indeed theOther is no longer simply a phantasmagor-ical presence projected and barely discern-ible beyond the boundaries of the ecumenethe polis and the frontiers of the nation-stateAt the same time the discourse about theldquootherrdquo what is called the politics of alteritymarks a shift from the negative discourse ofanxiety and fear epitomized in the termldquoanomierdquo so well diagnosed by DurkheimSimmel and Freud and so aptly described byChristopher Lasch (1979) to the positivediscourse of solidarity inclusion acceptancetolerance citizenship and justice so welldiagnosed and described by Zymunt Bauman(1998b) Ulrich Beck (1997) Anthony Gid-dens (1990) and Jurgen Habermas (2001)

Are there any morals to be extracted fromthis profound transformation in the wayhumanity in general understands itself Forthe longest period of the history of human-kind groups remained both sheltered fromand inured to otherness by the solidity andstability of their traditions and their worldsCultures remained fairly segregated maps ofthe world in which the foreign strange andunknown was relegated beyond the bound-aries of the controllable and surveyable Tothis extent lsquoothernessrsquo was legislated over byreligion the state nature and even historynamely those centres of gravity of cultureand images of the world In an age in whichall traditions are under constant revision andhuman temporality converges with the age ofthe world itself then lsquoothernessrsquo appearsbefore us as naked unmediated otherness weare all others before each other In otherwords neither our sense of identity nor thesense of difference of the other are given apriori they are always discovered consti-tuted and dismantled in the very processes ofencounter The other was always constitutedfor us by extrinsic forces Now the other isconstituted in the very process of our iden-tity formation but in a contingent fashion

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 17

We make others as we make ourselves Thisreflection links up with some insights thatEnrique Dussel has had with respect to therelationship between the emergence of citiesand the development of the first codes ofethics the Hammurabi Code and the BookN of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Dussel1998) Such codes arose precisely becauseindividuals were thrown into the proximityof each other and were thus confronted witheach otherrsquos vulnerability and injurabilityThe injuction to take care of the poor theindigent the orphan the widow the invalidcould only arise out of the urban experienceof the contiguity with the injurable flesh ofthe stranger Today the experience of theindigent other is of the immigrant the exiledthe refugee who build their enclaves in theshadows of the glamorous city of transna-tional capital (King 1990 Sassen 1999) Forthis reason the other and the immigrant areinterchangeable but this also raises the issueof the new global city as a space for therepresentation and formation of post-colo-nial identities Geo-cities are spaces for thereconfiguration of image the imaginationand the imaginary as Arjun Appaduraiargued (1996) In this sense the centrality ofthe urban experience for humanity meansthat otherness is not going to be a meremetaphysical or even phenomenological cat-egory and concern Under the reign of thecity Otherness has become quotidian andpractical

Fourth another fundamental point ofdeparture for a phenomenology of global-ization will have to be the analysis of theplace of technology in our everyday lives Iwould like to understand technology in twosenses First in its broadest sense as ldquothe useof scientific knowledge to specify ways ofdoing things in a reproducible wayrdquo (Bell1976 p 29) Second as a prosthesis of thehuman body Technology to paraphrase awonderful aphorism of William Burroughsis the mind wanting more body I will discussfirst the former sense of technology as ascientific specification for the iterable way ofdoing things In this sense then a hospital is

a social technology like agriculture and cattleraising are material technologies By the sametoken prisons asylums and ghettos are socialtechnologies There is however somethingunique about technology in the 20th centuryand that is that technology itself has becomean object of technology in other words theuse of science in order to produce ever moreefficient ways of doing things in ever morereproducible ways itself has become a tech-nological quest This technology of technol-ogy is what one might call the institutional-ization of invention Alfred NorthWhitehead noted that ldquothe greatest inventionof the 19th century was the invention of themethod of inventionrdquo (Whitehead 1925 p141) What Whitehead attributes to the 19thcentury reached its true apogee in the secondhalf of the 20th century with the institu-tionalization of the research universityWhile the programme of the research uni-versity goes back to the German ideal of theuniversity it is in the USA that this ideagained its highest formalization and statesupport Without question we have to attrib-ute the greatest technological breakthroughsof the 20th century to this unique con-vergence of the state the military and theresearch university what Eisenhower calledthe militaryndashindustrial complex and whatwe now with hindsight should more appro-priately call the militaryndashuniversityndashindus-trial complex (Kenney 1986 Aronowitz2000)

The rise of the nation-state also signifiedthe rise of state-sponsored education and thestate university The university plays a dualrole On the one hand it has the function ofpreparing citizens and workers for the mate-rial and cultural-political self-reproductionof society On the other it has the role ofinstitutionalizing scientific investigation theinvention of invention Through the uni-versity the state invests in its future ability totransform its material technologies of self-reproduction Winning Nobel prizes is notjust a matter of pride it is above all aquestion of institutional power to supportimmense research budgets whose actual

18 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

industrial and technical application might befar off into the future This is one of thereasons why the USA has remained a worldpower despite its apparent military stale-mate namely because it still remains thecentre for the production of most techno-logical innovation

Related to the invention of invention whatI called the institutionalization of the tech-nology of technology as its other side is theinterpenetration of technology in everyaspect of our lives Even those who are notdirectly affected by technological revolutionsin their daily life are nonetheless indirectlyaffected insofar as their worlds economiesand cultures are made vulnerable to take-overs and colonization by those who drivethe technological revolutions of today Forthe longest period of the history of humanitytechnology remained distant from the livesand bodies of men and women not because itdid not impact them but because it did sosporadically and in such tangential ways firethe wheel the printing press the metalplough the steam engine the automobileEach technological innovation however hasmeant a further interpenetration betweentool and human body With this I turn to thediscussion of technology as prosthesis thesecond sense of technology I want to con-sider in light of a phenomenology ofglobalization

A technology is a way of doing things inways that can be reproduced again andagain and that therefore can be taught andpassed on Culture is in this sense the mostcomplex and important technology of all Inthis sense a technology is a way for asociety to extend itself across time fromgeneration to generation century to century(Giddens 1984 1987) A technology gen-erally instantiated itself in tools Tools allowparticular individuals to reach beyond theboundaries of their own bodies A tool is anextension of a particular bodily organ thataugments its original performance Tool andbody however have remained relatively dis-tinct even if one can claim that the hand isa product of our invention of tools

(Rothenberg 1993) Recognition of the dis-tinctness between tool and body does notentail the negation of their dialectical inter-dependence and co-modification Their dis-tinctness was sustained by what I havealready referred to above as the temporalityof humans and the time of the world Whenthe time of humans and the world convergewhat mediates their encounter tools hasalready fused with the body or has alreadymade the world immediate Our experienceof the world is already so mediated by ourtechnological tools that we cannot distin-guish the world from the tool and thesefrom the body We are our tools We are ourtechnological prosthesis because they arethe world (Brahm and Driscoll 1995) Butthis does not mean that technology is itselftransparent Rather technology itself hasbecome like our bodies in the sense that wedo not know how our livers hearts orbrains work we just assume that they willdo what they were designed to do and ifthey break down then we go to aspecialist

Everywhere we are surrounded by techno-logical devices which have insinuated them-selves in our lives and without which wecannot do the watch the telephone the carthe television but also toothpaste X-raysvaccines birth control pills condoms sunscreen eye-glasses shavers purified andchlorinated water and so on

What I am talking about can be illustratedby comparing Mary Shelleyrsquos Frankensteinin which a creation out of human partsbecomes monstrous precisely because itentails the complete instrumentalization ofour bodies and thus a sacrilage of its allegeddivine naturalness and Donna Harawayrsquosborgs which demonstrate and theorize towhat extent we are always already synthetic(Haraway 1991) There is no nature outsidethe confines of the laboratory Resistance isfutile to the logic of technology because weare all already borg we are products of ourtechnologies and nature exists only as anArcadian fantasy This reading should not betaken to be suggesting that nature does not

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 19

exist in the sense that it is a fiction the mirageof radical social constructivism Rather thepoint is to highlight the ways in which natureis to be thought of in terms of what today wecall the lsquorecursive loopsrsquo between technologyand nature in which nature is already anlsquoartefactrsquo and lsquomachinesrsquo are natural (Hayles1999) Indeed appropriating Marxrsquos languagefrom his 1844 manuscripts we have to talkabout the humanization of machines and themechanization of humanity

Is there a moral to be extracted by theinterpenetration of humans and their techno-logical prosthesis to the point that youcannot distinguish them any longer I wouldsay that a Heideggerian response to thisquestion is anachronistic and indefensibleOn the other hand a dia-mat in the sense ofEngelsrsquos dialectical materialism will not doeither Science is neither metaphysically badnor a malleable ideological epiphenomenonAgainst these two positions I would advo-cate what has been called Kranzbergrsquos lawwhich reads ldquotechnology is neither good norbad nor is it neutralrdquo (Castells 1996 Vol 1p 65)

I would like to summarize my reflectionsby suggesting that once a phenomenology ofglobalization takes seriously the points ofdeparture discussed above we will discoverthat globalization might stand for anotheraxial period This new axial age will becharacterized by at least these four themesfirst the perpetual revolutionizing of pro-duction technologies has turned into thetechnology of innovation in such a way thatthe generation of capital is relocated to theproduction of new information technologiesand not production and processing of rawmaterials Second because of the almostinstantaneous information transmission andreception across the world and the con-vergence of natural historical and personaltemporalities we have the effect of the de-transcendentalization and temporalization oftradition These de-transcendentalizationsand temporalizations suggest that our imagesof the world will be at the reach of our owndesign In this sense we will be able to speak

of the true secularization of the world and itscomplete humanization Third is the routini-zation and de-metaphysicalization of other-ness brought about by the hyper-urbaniza-tion of humanity Otherness will become aproduct of society and in this sense we willhave to talk of regimes of alterization Thelsquootherrsquo then will become a continuouspresence that will require our constant con-cern and vigilance Fourth is the dissolutionof the boundary between natural and syn-thetic body and tool technology and natureWe will have to speak then of the age inwhich humans have become their own crea-tions and in which the directions of thereproduction of both mind and body cultureand technology will become a concern ofpolitical practice of paramount importance

The image of the world projected byglobalization is one which collapses thedifferences between biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time whatwe see is what we get To put it in thelanguage of an essay by Theodor Adorno thehistory of nature is no different from thehistory of humanity (Adorno 1984) Global-ization also projects an image of the world inwhich otherness is not external and intract-able but produced from within Finallyglobalization is an image of the world inwhich the natural and the social the createdand uncreated have been brought togetherunder the insight that we have been produc-ing ourselves as we have been producingtools to alter the world Now however theproducing of our tools is not different fromthe production of ourselves and our worldIn the image of the world projected byglobalization the world is humanity lookingat itself through its eyes and not the eyes ofa god history or nature

III City of angels

ldquoWho is the observer when it concerns thequestion about the function of religion thesystem of religion itself or science as anexternal observerrdquo (Luhmann 2000 p 118)

20 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

The kind of phenomenology of globalizationthat I sketched above allows us to ask aboutthe kinds of challenges religion faces in anage of globalization For religion appears as aresource of images concepts traditions andpractices that can allow individuals andcommunities to deal with a world that ischanging around them by the hour (Robert-son and Garrett 1991 Luhmann 2000) Inthe new Unubersichtlichkeit [unsurveyabil-ity] of our global society religion appears ascompendium of intuitions that have not beenextinguished by the so-called process ofsecularization (Mendieta forthcoming a)Most importantly however religion cannotbe dismissed or derided because it is theprivileged if not the primary form in whichthe impoverished masses of the invisiblecities of the world (those cities to which Ipointed in the first part of this essay)articulate their hopes as well as critique theirworld

The first challenge to religion that ourphenomenology of globalization allow us toarticulate has to do with the lsquode-transcenden-talizing of othernessrsquo or what I also wouldlike to call the lsquoroutinization of othernessrsquoThere is a correlation between the wayhumanity has conceptualized otherness met-aphysically and conceptually on the onehand and humanityrsquos relationship to real andconcrete otherness as it has been experiencedexistentially and phenomenologically on theother hand This correlation has been medi-ated by humanityrsquos decreasing ruralism Inother words the less rural and thus the moreurban dwelling humans have become theless other is the otherness that we can thinkof or dream up The suggestion is that themetaphysics of alterity that has guided somuch of Western theology and religiousthinking over the last 2000 years has beendetermined by a particular asymmetrybetween the country and the city For thelongest history of humanity most societieshave been farming and rural-dwelling com-munities and associations Contact betweenextremely different communities and societ-ies was sporadic and rare and when contact

did occurred this was meditated by citydwellers and the long memory of popularmythologies But as was noted above in thedawning 21st century most humans will becity dwellers Furthermore In the 21st cen-tury most humanity will be conglomerated inthe mega-urbes of the Third World Underthis circumstance the holy other the abso-lutely other will be deflated Alterity and theextraordinary what can also be called thetremendum are de-mystified and de-met-aphysicalized (Habermas 1992 Placher1996) Either everyone will be a stranger orno one will be because we will all bestrangers in a city of strangers In such asituation otherness will have become a rou-tine an un-extra-ordinary event How thenare we to think divine alterity the othernessof the holy in a situation in which onto-logically and metaphysically all alterity hasbeen deflated demoted rendered normallevelled to the cotidian Are we in a situationof having to ldquorisk a new idea of holinessrdquo asBarry Taylor Pastor at the Sanctuary Churchin Santa Monica put it This would have tobe a holiness which is not other worldly buta holiness which is about the difference anduniqueness of others those who are oureveryday other with whom we ride thesubway with whom we walk the streets ofpopulated mega-urbes of the new age withwhom we share in anonymity the crowdedspaces of the new cities The real andmetaphorical wilderness of the world of itsjungles and forests of its undiscovered con-tinents and untamed seas of its unmappeddeserts and unnavigated rivers were excusesas well instigations to go searching for godbeyond the familial the urbane the too closeand already lsquodomesticatedrsquo God was beyondthe world other than the world Now thequestion is how do we discover the other inthe mundane difference of every fellowhuman being and the crowded city ofstrangers

The second challenge has to do with thecity as locus of the culture of consumptionas the site for an ethos of immediacyhedonism and hyper-excitation Sassen

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 21

speaks of the city as the crossroads of aconfrontation between the flows of capitaland the flows of peoples One of the waysthese flows clash in cities is through theconfrontation between cultures that isbetween different modalities of life Themore people become urban dwellers themore people are exposed to the cornucopiaof cultural possibilities It is not just thatmore people are in cities it is also that morepeople are seeking to participate in thestandards of life promised by urban dwellingThe challenges are unprecedented We arepresently choking in our own refuse in ourown garbage The psychological toil mustalso be unprecedented The level of unmetexpectations unfilled desires the gapbetween universally promised but exorbi-tantly expensive commodities that shatteredself-images and worth and that are availableto a relatively small fraction of the worldpopulation has grown exponentially Thereis another underside to the city as thecrossroads of the clash of modalities of lifeThe more cities grow the more they exerttheir pull on the so-called hinterland therural areas The more agriculture is mecha-nized and industrialized the more we adoptbiotechnology the more superfluous ldquofarm-ersrdquo become At the same time the expansionof telecommunications television and paidfor television and satellite connections havemade it easier to link up and peer into theldquotube of plentyrdquo to use that wonderfulphrase by Erik Barnouw (1990 [1975]) Thecity literally and metaphorically consumes itshinterland its outlying areas of supply itconsumes its resources and produce but alsoits cultures and its peoples

It is perhaps unnecessary to underscoreagain that most of the consumption of ruralresources is taking place in the metropolisesof the so-called First World So not onlymust we address the rampant and rapaciousconsumerism of cities in general but also theparticularly scandalous and grotesque asym-metry between the consumption of FirstWorld cities and Third World cities Thisissue becomes particularly pressing when in

the so-called advanced nations of the worldwe have thinkers intellectuals and criticstalking about a politics and culture of inclu-sion and tolerance (Habermas 1998) Thispolitics of inclusion is articulated with thebest intentions in mind The assumptionguiding it is that people throughout theworld would be better if they could partici-pate more equitably in the same kinds of so-called basic needs and luxuries that wewesterners enjoy But there is somethingprofoundly disingenuous and deleteriouslynaotildeve about such a view In some cases thepoverty of those across the world to whomwe would like to extend our standard ofliving is due precisely to our luxury Thatwhich we want to share is the cause of theprivation we want to alleviate Thus perhapsthe agenda should not be one of inclusionbut of dismantling the system that occa-sioned in the first place the exclusions webenefited and continue to benefit from

In this situation then the challengebecomes how to think of an urban culture offrugality The challenge is how to translatethe religious message and teaching of povertyas a holy way as a holy calling into a secularvalue a secular calling Another way ofputting it would be how do we translate thevisions of the desert fathers St Francis ofAssisi Mohandas Gandhi into an urbanvision for a spiritually starving youth Oralternatively if we think of what ArnoldToynbee and Eric Hobsbawn said about the20th century namely that its greatestachievement was the expansion of the middleclass then the goal for the 21st centuryshould be the expansion of a globalizedldquoliving level classrdquo In other words we haveto develop a culture for which the greatestachievement is not that everyone else will livelike us but that we will live at the level thatallows the most people to share in the mostfundamental goods potable water clean airinfant nutrition to sustain healthy standardsof unstunted growth and the possibility ofbasic education Here I would have to saythat I concur with Hardt and Negri on theircanonization of Assisi as a saint in the

22 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

hagiography of revolutionary militancy(2000 p 413)

The third challenge that our phenomenol-ogy of globalization allows us to elucidate hasto do with one of its central locus of analysisnamely the city If cities have become the siteswhere the unbundling of the state takes placethat is if we take cities to be the sites for thede-nationalizing of the national and if we atthe same time take the city as the locus of anemergent juridification or process of legal-ization of new forms of relationships then arewe not in need of having to re-think therelationship between the legal and politicalstructures of the emergent supra-nationalstate and the para- or extra-statist ldquochurchrdquoAnother way of putting it would be to notethat the church at least in the West antecedesthe modern nation-state In fact the churchwas the state and that partly because of thisthe quest for modernity the process ofmodernization entailed a secularization ofstate and legal structures In the process thechurchrsquos sphere of operation becamerestricted or constrained by the spaces drawnby the boundaries of nation-states Churchesand denominations became identified withnational boundaries which took place not-withstanding the underlying and fundamentaluniversalist thrust of Christianity If weaccept Sassenrsquos analysis which we must giventhe overwhelming evidence then we areinescapably put in the situation of having tore-think the relationship between the churchand the state In fact as the nation-states of the19th and 20th century are unbundled andnew forms of political and legal rights emergein de-territorialized and de-nationalizedforms of political self-determination then thechurch itself will have to face its de-national-ization and de-territorialization At the sametime however one of the fundamental condi-tions of the presence of the church in the 21stcentury will have to be that it must havelearned the lessons of the last 500 years ofcolonialism imperialism and post-colonial-ism This means that the challenge is dual Onthe one hand the new church must find aplace beyond the nation-states of political

modernity but on the other hand it must doso with a post-colonialist and post-imperialistattitude In the age of global transformationsthe new church cannot and will not be able toserve as an agent of globalization for the newimperial masters that began to profile them-selves in the horizon namely a united front ofEuropean nations (an expanded NATO) atechnological elite bent on re-designingnature and a cosmopolitan nobility withoutcontrols allegiances or consciences

Fourth and finally I think that anotherextremely important challenge has to do withthe insight that cities are the places wherecultures come to cultivate each other Inother words cities are the places where oldcultures are cannibalized but also carniv-alized where old cultures which are dyingcome to be renewed but also where newcultures are produced from the remains ofold ones (Hamacher 1997) Cities are germi-nals of new cultures Indeed just as we arevery likely to find micro-climates in mostglobal cities we are likely to find culturalenclaves little Italys Chinatowns Japan-towns little Bombays etc These places arewhere the centripetal and centrifugal forcesof homogenization and heterogenizationinteract to produce new cultural formationsUnderlying this new cultural genesis is itsevident and almost presentist character Theprocesses of cultural genesis take place rightin front of our eyes Cultures are notmillennial sedimentations and even thatwhich is peddled as the oldest is a present-day version of the old Most importantlycultures have become something we produceand choose cultures are something which weeither nurture and preserve or abandon anddisavow In all of these cases we are notpassive but active agents of transformationIn this situation the challenge for the newchurch for an urban ministry for the 21stcentury is how to develop an ecclesiology ofcultural diversity How will the new churchparticipate in this cultural genesis that isgerminating in global cities while retaining asense of identity Or conversely how will itretain a sense of cultural identity without

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 23

becoming either ethnocentric or jingoisticabout its cultural bequest without contribut-ing to the ossification of its own culture Onwhat terms can the new church participate inthe creation of new cultures and the preser-vation of successful ones

Conclusion

Cities are the vortex of the convergence ofthe processes of globalization and local-ization Cities are epitomes of glocalizationto use Robertsonrsquos language (1994) They arealso sites of the sedimentation of history Inthis essay I have sough to advance theresearch agenda that would take the ldquoinvisi-ble citiesrdquo of the so-called Third World astheir primary object of analysis At the sametime however I have urged that we look atthe cities in the developed industrializedworld through the eyes of their invisibleinhabitants and citizens immigrants ethnicminorities disenfranchised groups workerswomen and the youth There are invisiblecities within the cities that are so visible inmost urban theory and analysis as well asinvisible cities that remain unseen becausethey are not on the horizon of the academicagendas of researchers in the universities ofthe developed world

In tandem I have suspended judgementon whether to be for or against global-ization not because I do not think that wecan make moral judgments in this case butbecause I think we need to broaden ouranalyses of this new order of things Ideveloped some general points of departurefor a phenomenological analysis of global-ization This particular approach I thinkexhibits how ldquoglobalizationrdquo can and oughtto become a matter for serious philosophicalreflection I have identified the issues ofalterity temporality tradition the distinc-tion between the natural and the syntheticas philosophemes that are substantivelyimpacted by the processes of globalizationYet the phenomenological approach Iarticulate is deliberate in assuming a partic-

ular perspective or angle of approach I havesought to delineate a phenomenology ofglobalization from below The world doesnot disclose itself in the same way to allsubjects much less globalization Thus thephenomenology here presented urges us tolook at the world from below from theperspective of those who seem to be moreadversely than beneficially affected by theprocesses that make up globalization

This is what the ldquobelowrdquo in the subtitle ofthe essay pointed to the below of the poorand destitute the below of those who are notseen and do not register in the radar of socialtheory Furthermore I have tried to furtherqualify that perspective from below byfocusing my attention on the issue of reli-gion Religion clearly can mean manythings but at the very least it means ldquothe sighof the oppressedrdquo and the ldquoencyclopediccompendiumrdquo of a heartless world as Marxput it (1994 p 28) if only because it is theform in which the destitute the most vulner-able in our world express their critiques aswell as hopes I have argued that we ought tolook at cities as germinals of new culturesand that if we want to trace the emergentcultures of those ldquobelowrdquo then we betterlook at religious movements In what waysare the religious language of the oppressedand disenfranchised of the invisible cities ofglobalization critiques and resistances toglobalization This is clearly a researchdesideratum rather than a description oreven assessment

Note

1 I want to thank Bob Catterall for encouraging me towrite this article and for his comments on earlyversions of it I also want to thank Lois AnnLorentzen and Nelson Maldonado Torres who readit with great care and made substantive suggestionscorrections and criticisms that have made meunderstand better my own project I also want tothank Enrique Dussel Jurgen Habermas WalterMignolo and Santiago Castro-Gomez with whom Ihave discussed many of the ideas here developedand who have given me impetus to continue alongthis line with their own pioneering works

24 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Bibliography

Adorno TW (1984) lsquoThe idea of natural historyrsquo Telos60 pp 31ndash42

Amin S (1996) Capitalism in the Age of GlobalizationThe Management of Contemporary Society Londonand New York Zed Books

Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large CulturalDimensions of Globalization MinneapolisUniversity of Minnesota Press

Appiah KA (1992) In My Fatherrsquos House Africa in thePhilosophy of Culture New York Oxford UniversityPress

Aronowitz S (2000) The Knowledge FactoryDismantling the Corporate University and CreatingTrue Higher Learning Boston Beacon Press

Barber BR (1995) Jihad vs McWorld How Globalismand Tribalism are Reshaping the World New YorkBallantine Books

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1993) lsquoA globalizingeconomy some implications and consequencesrsquo inB Mazlish and R Buultjens (eds) ConceptualizingGlobal History pp 153ndash172 Boulder COWestview Press

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1994) Global DreamsImperial Corporations and the New World OrderNew York Simon amp Schuster

Barnouw E (1990 [1975]) Tube of Plenty TheEvolution of American Television New YorkOxford University Press

Baudrillard J (1981) For a Critique of the PoliticalEconomy of the Sign St Louis MO Telos Press

Bauman Z (1998a) Globalization The HumanConsequences New York Columbia UniversityPress

Bauman Z (1998b) lsquoPostmodern religionrsquo in P Heelas(ed) Religion Modernity and PostmodernityCambridge Blackwell

Beck U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung Frankfurt amMain Suhrkamp

Bell D (1976) The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism New York Basic Books

Benford G (1999) Deep Time How HumanityCommunicates Across Millenia New York AvonBooks Inc

Beyer P (1994) Religion and Globalization LondonSage

Brahm Jr G and Driscoll M (eds) (1995) ProstheticTerritories Politics and Hypertechnologies BoulderCO Westview

Bretherton C and Ponton G (eds) (1996) GlobalPolitics An Introduction Cambridge Blackwell

Calvino I (1974) Invisible Cities New York HarcourtBrace Jovanovich

Casanova J (1994) Public Religions in the ModernWorld Chicago University of Chicago Press

Castells M (1996ndash8) The Information Age EconomySociety and Culture Vol 1 The Rise of the

Network Society Vol 2 The Power of Identity Vol3 End of Millenium Malden MA and OxfordBlackwell Publishers

Chaunu P (1974) Historie science sociale la dureelrsquoespace et lrsquohomme a lrsquoepoque moderne ParisSociete drsquoedition drsquoenseignement superieur

Clark RP (1997) The Global Imperative AnInterpretative History of the Spread of HumankindBoulder CO Westview Press

Costello P (1993) World Historians and Their GoalsTwentieth-century Answers to Modernism DeKalbNorthern Illinois University Press

Dawkins K (1997) Gene Wars The Politics ofBiotechnology New York Seven Stories Press

de Benoist A (1996) lsquoConfronting globalizationrsquo Telos108 pp 117ndash137

Dussel E (1998) Etica de la Liberacion en la edad deglobalizacion y de la exclusion Madrid EditorialTrotta

Elias N (1992) Time An Essay Cambridge MA BasilBlackwell

Featherstone M (1995) Undoing CultureGlobalization Postmodernism and Identity LondonSage Publications

Fritsche J (1999) Historical Destiny and NationalSocialism in Heideggerrsquos Being and Time Berkeleyand Los Angeles University of California Press

Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of SocietyCambridge Polity Press

Giddens A (1987) Social Theory and ModernSociology Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of ModernityCambridge Polity Press

Gray J (1998) False Dawn The Delusions of GlobalCapitalism London Granta Books

Grossberg L (1999) lsquoSpeculations and articulations ofglobalizationrsquo Polygraph 11 pp 11ndash48

Habermas J (1992) Postmetaphysical ThinkingPhilosophical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (1998) The Inclusion of the Other Studiesin Political Theory Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (2001) The Postnational ConstellationPolitical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Hall Sir Peter (1998) Cities in Civilization New YorkPantheon Books

Hamacher W (1997) lsquoOne 2 many multiculturalismsrsquoin H de Vries and S Weber (eds) ViolenceIdentity and Self-determination Stanford CAStanford University Press

Haraway D (1991) Simians Cyborgs and WomenThe Reinvention of Nature New York Routledge

Hardt M and Negri A (2000) Empire CambridgeMA Harvard University Press

Harvey D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity AnEnquiry into the Origins of Cultural ChangeCambridge MA Basil Blackwell

Hayles NK (1999) How we Became PosthumanVirtual Bodies in Cybernetics Literature and

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 11

by immigrants and women of colour tomention the actors Sassen mentions

I will go a step forward and focus on theUSA Home to at least four of the mostimportant megapolises in the circuits oftechnology information finance capital aswell as immigration and urban oppositionalpolitics from below (New York ChicagoLos Angeles and Miami) the USA has had along history of bias against cities Thesebiases are built into the tax structures at thefederal and local levels They are built into thevery policies of the Welfare State and theallocation of national wealth through devel-opment grants tax incentives brakes grantsand loans etc A whole series of factors hasbuilt a complex web of legal and tax codesinfra-structure construction developmentincentives etc that adversely affects the coreareas of cities and which simultaneouslyrewards urban sprawl privatization highwayconstruction and urban capital flight In briefin the USA at least very clearly and con-certedly since the end of World War IIhousing taxing educational highway con-structions policies etc have conspired toproduce the hollowing of cities and theexpansion of a socially wasteful and eco-logically devastating urban sprawl The majorinfo-megapolises of the New Brave World ofsurreal wealth are oases of grotesque luxuryin the midst of vast deserts of povertycrumbling infra-structure rusting bridgesbroken public phones poor and unsuitablepublic schools and the litany can go Thislogic of urban development in the USA hasbeen a luxury that can only be bought at theexpense of the asymmetries which I pointedout earlier And here I would like to referpeople to the work of Daniel D Luria andJoel Rogers on a new urban politics for the21st century (Jackson 1985 Massey andDenton 1993 Luria and Rogers 1999)

The point however that I am trying toelaborate is the following It is simply not thecase that different actors enter the territoryof the global city on the same level In fact itis a territory that is already organized in sucha way as to preclude certain agents from

confronting from elaborating their rights tothe city with the same level of force andefficacy that transnationals enact and enforcetheir claims on urban space My questionthen would be how do we develop ananalysis that takes into account the unlev-elled terrain that constitutes the new topol-ogy of power in which certain actors aremore clearly at a disadvantage than othersWhat new forms of legitimacy and politicscan we appeal to or begin to configure whenurban dwellers find themselves historicallycondemned to always stand in a substan-tively adverse situation of economic polit-ical and legal power vis-a-vis the sub-stantively effective legal financial andpolitical forces of globalizing finance capitalIn what way in short can we begin toelaborate a politics of the right to the city touse that felicitous phrase of Henri Lefebvrewhich unquestionably will become the num-ber one form of politics in this age of mega-cities and hyper-urbanization from thestandpoint of those who have been histor-ically excluded from exercising their rights totheir cities (Lefebvre 1969)

II A phenomenology of globalization

ldquoThe expression lsquophenomenologyrsquo can beformulated in Greek as legein taphainomena But legein meansapophainesthai Hence phenomenologymeans apophphainesthai taphainomena mdashto let what shows itself beseen from itself just as it shows itself fromitself That is the formal meaning of thetype of research that call itselflsquophenomenologyrsquo But this expressesnothing other than the maxim formulatedabove lsquoTo the things themselvesrsquo rdquo(Heidegger 1996 p 30)

I turn now to the presentation of what I calla phenomenology of globalization By aphenomenology of globalization I under-stand the analysis of those experiences thathuman beings in varying degrees are under-going as a result of new socio-economic-

12 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

cultural and political processes which in turncondition the horizon of all possible expecta-tions against which new experiences arepossible at all

Human experience happens against a spa-tio-temporal background the life-world Atthe same time human experience projectsitself forward into a horizon of expectationsthat is conditioned by the structures of thelife-world Human experience therefore isalways framed or structured by spatial andtemporal co-ordinates Ideas of the world orworld-views are coagulations of those spa-tio-temporal configurations (Giddens 19841987) Images of the world or world-imagesare ways in which we understand our rela-tionships to space and time For this reasonthe way we conceptualize the world imaginethe world mirrors the way we conceptualizeourselves as humans The point of thesereflections is to begin to think of global-ization as a way of viewing the world as animage of the world (Heidegger 1977) And tothis extent then globalization acquires aphilosophical status that requires a phenom-enological analysis (Jameson 1998)

In the following I would like to describewhat I take to be fundamental elements of aphenomenology of globalization I discussfour points of departure for a phenomenol-ogy of globalization from the perspective ofthose most adversely affected by the impactsand transformations unleashed by global-ization It is also clear that they betray aWestern perspective although one which isconscious of the privilege and narrownessthat underwrites and supports it

First any phenomenology of globalizationwill have to begin with the descriptionanalysis and study of the exponential accel-eration of the production and disseminationof information Of course information is notknowledge Knowledge might be broadlydefined as ldquoa set of organized statements offacts or ideas presenting a reasoned judg-ment or an experimental result which istransmitted to others through some commu-nication medium rdquo (see Castells 1996 Vol1 p 17 n 27) Information on the other

hand presupposes knowledge and dataMore precisely information is the commu-nication of knowledge and data in such away that the latter has to be discriminatedfrom the former Data are made up of rawstatements and experimental results withoutthe reasoned judgment No one will deny theleaps in knowledge acquisition and informa-tion transmission that have taken place overthe last 50 years since the atom bomb wasfirst invented and exploded over desert atLos Alamos It is this glaring transformationof our knowledge of the world ourselves andthe cosmos in general that has incited someto call this the ldquoinformation agerdquo

If we follow Karl Jaspers as well asPierre Chaunu and Ferdinand Braudel wemight suggest that every major epochaltransformation in human consciousness wascatalysed by transformations in the meansof acquisition of knowledge and its com-munication through different media ortools of information The axial period ofwhich Jaspers spoke in his work on TheOrigin and Goal of History which tookplace between the 6th and 2nd centuriesbefore Christ had to do with the inventionof books the development of major citiesand the expansion of networks of economicexchange in terms of trade routes (Jaspers1953) At this time however paper andbooks were fragile expensive and to a largeextent tools of luxury and privilegeKnowledge of the world was guided bymythological world-views which were con-trolled by almost unassailable authoritiesThe 16th century another axial age wasmarked by the printing revolution inaugu-rated by Gutenberg the establishment ofnew trade routes and the secularization ofknowledge production and distributionwith the emergence of philosophers andintellectuals

The 20th century has marked yet anothershift in the way we produce and distributeknowledge and disseminate it as informa-tion One of the greatest unsung and neglec-ted triumphs of the 20th century has beenthe institutionalization of mass education

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 13

Many have been the horrors that havevisited cultures through their encounterwith the nation-state but one of the clearbenefits of this encounter has been thedevelopment of mass literacy and the estab-lishment of education institutions that are ifnot de facto at least nominally open to allcitizens of the state Talcott Parsons calledthis achievement of the nation-state theeducational revolution Amartya Sen forinstance has urged us to measure absolutepoverty in terms of the years of schoolingalong with access to potable water qualityof air and access to minimally nutritiousfood (Sen 1999) But this is only the leastnoticeable although perhaps the mostimportant aspect of the information revolu-tion of the 20th century The most notice-able is of course the computer and tele-communications revolutions Jeremy Rifkinhas appropriately suggested that we talk interms of the ldquobio-tech centuryrdquo and that weunderstand that the genetic computer andtelecommunications revolutions are differ-ent flanks of one same front the informa-tion revolution (Rifkin 1998) DNA wasdiscovered by Watson and Crick in 1953 in1990 the USA launched the Genome proj-ect by the turn of the third millennium theentire human genome plus the genetic makeup of the most important foods will becontrolled by a few multinationals (Daw-kins 1997) In the USA already over 25of the grain produced is genetically engi-neered Presently one of the most impor-tant conflicts between the USA and Europesince the deployment of missiles throughoutWestern Europe during the 1960s and 1980sis brewing over the import of geneticallyaltered produce and meats You might wantto call this bio-tech imperialism but youmay also call it the carrying out to itslogical conclusion of the ldquoagricultural revo-lutionrdquo (Shiva 1991 1997 1999) Similarlythe computer was invented during the1940s but only began to be mass producedin the 1970s Today any laptop has morecomputational power than all of the com-puters of the first generation put together

Micro-chips are superseded every 18months with each new cycle increasingexponentially the speed memory and con-centration of micro-processors In 1957 theRussians launched Sputnik the first artificialsatellite the Americans followed in 1962with the launching of Telstar 1 the firsttelevision satellite Today there are morethan 200 satellites forming a canopy ofelectric nodes linking the world in a net ofsynchronous telecommunications It is pro-jected that by the first decade of the nextmillennium there will be more than 300satellites (National Geographic 1999)

One of the fundamental characteristics ofthe modern world is that the extraction ofraw materials and their transformation intocommodities has been demoted from itsplace of privilige in bourgeois capitalism bythe production of scientific knowledge andits dissemination as information This is whatthe information revolution amounts tonamely the superseding of the industrialrevolution by the transformation both in themeans and object of production (Baudrillard1981 Lash and Urry 1994 Lowe 1995)Today what matters is not the raw materialand the possession of the means of produc-tion instead what matters is the knowledgethat allows one to discover even invent rawmaterials which are processed through ever-changing means of production The clearestexample of this is the bio-tech industrywhere Monsanto is the perfect illustration ofthe supervening of raw materials and meansof production by the production of knowl-edge that controls seeds and how they areprocessed (Lappe and Bailey 1998 Rifkin1998)

Second the acceleration of the productionand information dissemination has had adirect and evident impact on the way wethink about history and tradition The dura-bility and unifying role of our world-viewsor images of the world is a function of therelationship between our individual bodilyexperience of space and time and the way theworld surrounding us itself undergoeschange The world around us in turn is

14 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

made up of the social world and the naturalworld Each one has its own rhythms andtime (Kubler 1962 Elias 1992 Heidegger1992 Benford 1999) In light of this weshould speak of a biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time (Wal-lerstein 1991) Biomorphic space-time is theway space and time are experienced by theindividual The clock that measures thisspace-time might be said to be the biologicalclock of each human being Social space-timeis what social groups societies communitieslive and experience This space-time is meas-ured in generations historical processesevents the rise and fall of cities The motor ofthis space-time is the level of socio-technicaldevelopment of a society its infra-structuresand super-structures World space-time is thepace at which the natural world evolves andtransforms seasons come and go rivers runand dry up mountains erode plains dry upand become deserts and forests are cut downand grow up or turn into shrubbery andwasteland The further back we look in thehistory of humanity the more disjointed andseparate were the rhythms at which thesedifferent clocks ran and operated

Today there is a convergence of the speedsof these different space-times If we comparethe speed of world space-time and bio-morphic space-time we find that they arerunning almost simultaneously In otherwords the more our own life-spans arelengthened and world space-time the timeor speed at which the world itself changesshrinks the more unstable and local are ourworld-views or images of the world Cosmo-logical views as well as abstract universalitywere able to be sustained as long as the worlddid not seem not to change and humans hadsuch short life-spans that any substantivechange in the world was not noticeable andexperienceable by any two or three genera-tions Pierre Chaunu (1974) remarked thatone of the fundamental elements in thepossibility for the communication of knowl-edge was the lengthening of the life-spans ofhumans during and after the 16th centuryToday we have the convergence of unprece-

dented human life-spans (to the extent thatsome societies are registering the divergentvectors of the general ageing of their popula-tions and the lowering of infant mortalitywhere both are clearly a function of theimprovement in general medicine and itshaving been made more broadly available)with unprecedentedly accelerated worldchanges The latter is not simply a meremirage occasioned by almost synchronousworld communication It is the case that weare changing the face of the planet in waysthat not just generations but individuals areable to note and distinctly remember In thisway we can talk about the malleability oftradition and the arbitrariness of history Inother words what Harvey and Giddenscalled respectively the compression and col-lapse of space-time manifests itself in thecontemporary plurification of historicalmethodologies and re-narrativation of histo-ries as well as the skepticism that anyhistorical chronology is not a function ofsome ideological agenda Historical revisionhas become the daily bread of the historicallycynical masses of peoples who cannot read inhistory the telos of either emancipation orrationality In the age of globalization reasondoes not entail freedom nor revolution free-dom nor reason revolution In this way wecan say with Heelas Lash and Morris that welive in an post-traditional or de-tradition-alized world in which these notations thatgave cohesion and direction to the project ofmodernity have been superseded or ren-dered ideological and historicized (Heelas etal 1996)

Third any phenomenology of globaliza-tion must also begin with what I take to be anequally momentous transformation ofhuman societies and this has to do with themega-urbanization of the world We can saythat for most of its history most of humanityhas been rural Cities developed as append-ages to large agricultural areas Cities werefunctional principles of rural areas Even-tually this relationship reversed but onlyafter the city ceased to be a communicationnode for agricultural exchange Cities started

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 15

to acquire their independence when theycould produce their own commoditiesnamely knowledge and political power Thisonly began to happen after the Renaissancewhen major cities were not just ports but alsocentres of learning culture and politicalpower (Hall 1998) This trend howeveronly takes off when industrialization allowscities to become their own productive cen-tres even if they still remain tied to ruralcentres The reversal of the relationshipbetween rural and urban areas howeverbegan to shift in the 1950s during these yearsalready 30 of all humanity lived in citiesThe United Nations projects that by the year2005 50 of humanity will live in citiesHere we must pause and reflect that thismeans that a substantive part of humanitywill still remain rural and that most of thoselsquofarmersrsquo and lsquopeasantsrsquo will be in so-calledThird World countries Nonetheless as EricHobsbawn remarked in his work The Age ofExtremes the ldquomost dramatic and far-reach-ing social change of the second half of the[the twentieth century] is the death of thepeasantryrdquo (Hobsbawn 1994 p 289) Theother side of this reversal of the relationshipbetween city and country is that most mega-cities will be in what is called the ThirdWorld By the third millennium the 10 mostpopulated metropolises of the World will beneither in Europe nor in the USA

These trends can be attributed to a varietyof factors The most important factor in theelimination of the rural is the industrializa-tion of agriculture a process that reached itszenith with the so-called ldquogreen revolutionrdquoof the 1950s and 1960s Under the industrial-ization of agriculture we must understandnot just the introduction of better tools butthe homogenization of agricultural produc-tion by which I mean the introduction on aglobal scale of the mono-cultivo (Shiva1993) We must also include here the elimina-tion of self-subsistent forms of farmingthrough the elimination of self-renewing bio-diverse eco-systems One of the most effec-tive ways however in which the city hasimposed itself over the countryside is

through the projection of images that desta-bilized the sense of tradition and culturalcontinuity so fundamental to the rhythms ofthe countryside Through television radioand now the internet the city assaults thefabric of the countryside Tradition is under-mined by the promises and riches projectedby the tube of plenty the cornucopia of otherpossibilities the television and its world ofinfo-tainment (see Baumanrsquos wonderful dis-cussion of how under the globalization ofentertainment the Benthamian Panopticonturns into the MacWorldInfotainment Syn-opticon (1998a pp 53ndash54))

Indeed one of the most characteristicaspects of globalization is what is called thedecreasing importance of the local the statethe national We therefore need to speakwith Jurgen Habermas and Paul Kennedy ofa post-national constellation in which sover-eign nation-states as territorially localizedhave become less important less in controlof their own spatiality (Kennedy 1993Habermas 2001) But what is forgotten isthat there is a simultaneous process oflocalization in which place acquires a newsignificance certain spaces of course (Feath-erstone 1995) The city is the site at whichthe forces of the local and the global meetthe site where the forces of transnationalfinance capital and the local labour marketsand national infra-structures enter into con-flict and contestation over the city AsSaskia Sassen writes

ldquoThe city has indeed emerged as a site fornew claims by global capital which uses thecity as an lsquoorganizational commodityrsquo butalso by disadvantage sectors of the urbanpopulation which in large cities arefrequently as internationalized a presence asis capital The denationalizing of urbanspace and the formation of new claims bytransnational actors and involvingcontestation raise the questionmdashwhose cityis itrdquo (Sassen 1998 p xx)

The city in fact has become the crossroadfor new denationalizing politics in whichglobal actors capitals and moving peoples

16 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

enter into conflict across a transnationalurban system

Habermas has noted with acuity that oneof the characteristics of the 18th and 19thcenturies was their pronounced fears of theldquomassrdquo ldquothe crowdrdquo (Habermas 2001 p39) Such fears were summarized in the titleof the prescient work by Ortega y GassetThe Revolt of the Masses (1985) As wasnoted already the 18th and the 19th centuriessignalled the reversal of the relationshipbetween countryside and city This reversalmeant the rapid urbanization and demo-graphic explosion in cities which accompanythe rapid industrialization of certain metro-polises of the West London Berlin NewYork Chicago Newark Mexico City PortoAlegre and the non-West New DehliTokyo Beijing Cairo etc Urbanization andIndustrialization gave rise to the spectre ofthe irascible insatiable uncontrollable massthat would raze everything in its path Threeclassical responses emerged Sorel and thecelebration of the creative power of anar-chical and explosive unorganized mass mobi-lization the Marxist-Leninist and theattempt to domesticate and train the creativeand transformative power of social unrestthrough the development of a party machin-ery that would guide the ire and discontentof gathered masses of unemployed andemployed workers and the conservative andreactionary response of an Edmund Burkebut which is also echoed in the works ofphilosophers like Heidegger which dis-dained and vilified the common folk themass in a simple term Das Man The crowdthe mass is consumed and distracted byprattle and curiosity as it wallows in themiasma of inauthenticity and cowardness(Fritsche 1999)

Today such attitudes seem not just foreignbut also unrealistic Most of our experience isdetermined by a continuous mingling withcrowds and large undifferentiated masses ofpeople We get on the road and we areconfronted with traffic jams we get on thesubway and people accost and touch us fromall directions We live in continuous friction

with the stranger the other May we suggestthat the ldquoOtherrdquo has become such an impor-tant point of departure for philosophicalreflection precisely because we exist in such acontinuous propinquity with it Indeed theOther is no longer simply a phantasmagor-ical presence projected and barely discern-ible beyond the boundaries of the ecumenethe polis and the frontiers of the nation-stateAt the same time the discourse about theldquootherrdquo what is called the politics of alteritymarks a shift from the negative discourse ofanxiety and fear epitomized in the termldquoanomierdquo so well diagnosed by DurkheimSimmel and Freud and so aptly described byChristopher Lasch (1979) to the positivediscourse of solidarity inclusion acceptancetolerance citizenship and justice so welldiagnosed and described by Zymunt Bauman(1998b) Ulrich Beck (1997) Anthony Gid-dens (1990) and Jurgen Habermas (2001)

Are there any morals to be extracted fromthis profound transformation in the wayhumanity in general understands itself Forthe longest period of the history of human-kind groups remained both sheltered fromand inured to otherness by the solidity andstability of their traditions and their worldsCultures remained fairly segregated maps ofthe world in which the foreign strange andunknown was relegated beyond the bound-aries of the controllable and surveyable Tothis extent lsquoothernessrsquo was legislated over byreligion the state nature and even historynamely those centres of gravity of cultureand images of the world In an age in whichall traditions are under constant revision andhuman temporality converges with the age ofthe world itself then lsquoothernessrsquo appearsbefore us as naked unmediated otherness weare all others before each other In otherwords neither our sense of identity nor thesense of difference of the other are given apriori they are always discovered consti-tuted and dismantled in the very processes ofencounter The other was always constitutedfor us by extrinsic forces Now the other isconstituted in the very process of our iden-tity formation but in a contingent fashion

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 17

We make others as we make ourselves Thisreflection links up with some insights thatEnrique Dussel has had with respect to therelationship between the emergence of citiesand the development of the first codes ofethics the Hammurabi Code and the BookN of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Dussel1998) Such codes arose precisely becauseindividuals were thrown into the proximityof each other and were thus confronted witheach otherrsquos vulnerability and injurabilityThe injuction to take care of the poor theindigent the orphan the widow the invalidcould only arise out of the urban experienceof the contiguity with the injurable flesh ofthe stranger Today the experience of theindigent other is of the immigrant the exiledthe refugee who build their enclaves in theshadows of the glamorous city of transna-tional capital (King 1990 Sassen 1999) Forthis reason the other and the immigrant areinterchangeable but this also raises the issueof the new global city as a space for therepresentation and formation of post-colo-nial identities Geo-cities are spaces for thereconfiguration of image the imaginationand the imaginary as Arjun Appaduraiargued (1996) In this sense the centrality ofthe urban experience for humanity meansthat otherness is not going to be a meremetaphysical or even phenomenological cat-egory and concern Under the reign of thecity Otherness has become quotidian andpractical

Fourth another fundamental point ofdeparture for a phenomenology of global-ization will have to be the analysis of theplace of technology in our everyday lives Iwould like to understand technology in twosenses First in its broadest sense as ldquothe useof scientific knowledge to specify ways ofdoing things in a reproducible wayrdquo (Bell1976 p 29) Second as a prosthesis of thehuman body Technology to paraphrase awonderful aphorism of William Burroughsis the mind wanting more body I will discussfirst the former sense of technology as ascientific specification for the iterable way ofdoing things In this sense then a hospital is

a social technology like agriculture and cattleraising are material technologies By the sametoken prisons asylums and ghettos are socialtechnologies There is however somethingunique about technology in the 20th centuryand that is that technology itself has becomean object of technology in other words theuse of science in order to produce ever moreefficient ways of doing things in ever morereproducible ways itself has become a tech-nological quest This technology of technol-ogy is what one might call the institutional-ization of invention Alfred NorthWhitehead noted that ldquothe greatest inventionof the 19th century was the invention of themethod of inventionrdquo (Whitehead 1925 p141) What Whitehead attributes to the 19thcentury reached its true apogee in the secondhalf of the 20th century with the institu-tionalization of the research universityWhile the programme of the research uni-versity goes back to the German ideal of theuniversity it is in the USA that this ideagained its highest formalization and statesupport Without question we have to attrib-ute the greatest technological breakthroughsof the 20th century to this unique con-vergence of the state the military and theresearch university what Eisenhower calledthe militaryndashindustrial complex and whatwe now with hindsight should more appro-priately call the militaryndashuniversityndashindus-trial complex (Kenney 1986 Aronowitz2000)

The rise of the nation-state also signifiedthe rise of state-sponsored education and thestate university The university plays a dualrole On the one hand it has the function ofpreparing citizens and workers for the mate-rial and cultural-political self-reproductionof society On the other it has the role ofinstitutionalizing scientific investigation theinvention of invention Through the uni-versity the state invests in its future ability totransform its material technologies of self-reproduction Winning Nobel prizes is notjust a matter of pride it is above all aquestion of institutional power to supportimmense research budgets whose actual

18 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

industrial and technical application might befar off into the future This is one of thereasons why the USA has remained a worldpower despite its apparent military stale-mate namely because it still remains thecentre for the production of most techno-logical innovation

Related to the invention of invention whatI called the institutionalization of the tech-nology of technology as its other side is theinterpenetration of technology in everyaspect of our lives Even those who are notdirectly affected by technological revolutionsin their daily life are nonetheless indirectlyaffected insofar as their worlds economiesand cultures are made vulnerable to take-overs and colonization by those who drivethe technological revolutions of today Forthe longest period of the history of humanitytechnology remained distant from the livesand bodies of men and women not because itdid not impact them but because it did sosporadically and in such tangential ways firethe wheel the printing press the metalplough the steam engine the automobileEach technological innovation however hasmeant a further interpenetration betweentool and human body With this I turn to thediscussion of technology as prosthesis thesecond sense of technology I want to con-sider in light of a phenomenology ofglobalization

A technology is a way of doing things inways that can be reproduced again andagain and that therefore can be taught andpassed on Culture is in this sense the mostcomplex and important technology of all Inthis sense a technology is a way for asociety to extend itself across time fromgeneration to generation century to century(Giddens 1984 1987) A technology gen-erally instantiated itself in tools Tools allowparticular individuals to reach beyond theboundaries of their own bodies A tool is anextension of a particular bodily organ thataugments its original performance Tool andbody however have remained relatively dis-tinct even if one can claim that the hand isa product of our invention of tools

(Rothenberg 1993) Recognition of the dis-tinctness between tool and body does notentail the negation of their dialectical inter-dependence and co-modification Their dis-tinctness was sustained by what I havealready referred to above as the temporalityof humans and the time of the world Whenthe time of humans and the world convergewhat mediates their encounter tools hasalready fused with the body or has alreadymade the world immediate Our experienceof the world is already so mediated by ourtechnological tools that we cannot distin-guish the world from the tool and thesefrom the body We are our tools We are ourtechnological prosthesis because they arethe world (Brahm and Driscoll 1995) Butthis does not mean that technology is itselftransparent Rather technology itself hasbecome like our bodies in the sense that wedo not know how our livers hearts orbrains work we just assume that they willdo what they were designed to do and ifthey break down then we go to aspecialist

Everywhere we are surrounded by techno-logical devices which have insinuated them-selves in our lives and without which wecannot do the watch the telephone the carthe television but also toothpaste X-raysvaccines birth control pills condoms sunscreen eye-glasses shavers purified andchlorinated water and so on

What I am talking about can be illustratedby comparing Mary Shelleyrsquos Frankensteinin which a creation out of human partsbecomes monstrous precisely because itentails the complete instrumentalization ofour bodies and thus a sacrilage of its allegeddivine naturalness and Donna Harawayrsquosborgs which demonstrate and theorize towhat extent we are always already synthetic(Haraway 1991) There is no nature outsidethe confines of the laboratory Resistance isfutile to the logic of technology because weare all already borg we are products of ourtechnologies and nature exists only as anArcadian fantasy This reading should not betaken to be suggesting that nature does not

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 19

exist in the sense that it is a fiction the mirageof radical social constructivism Rather thepoint is to highlight the ways in which natureis to be thought of in terms of what today wecall the lsquorecursive loopsrsquo between technologyand nature in which nature is already anlsquoartefactrsquo and lsquomachinesrsquo are natural (Hayles1999) Indeed appropriating Marxrsquos languagefrom his 1844 manuscripts we have to talkabout the humanization of machines and themechanization of humanity

Is there a moral to be extracted by theinterpenetration of humans and their techno-logical prosthesis to the point that youcannot distinguish them any longer I wouldsay that a Heideggerian response to thisquestion is anachronistic and indefensibleOn the other hand a dia-mat in the sense ofEngelsrsquos dialectical materialism will not doeither Science is neither metaphysically badnor a malleable ideological epiphenomenonAgainst these two positions I would advo-cate what has been called Kranzbergrsquos lawwhich reads ldquotechnology is neither good norbad nor is it neutralrdquo (Castells 1996 Vol 1p 65)

I would like to summarize my reflectionsby suggesting that once a phenomenology ofglobalization takes seriously the points ofdeparture discussed above we will discoverthat globalization might stand for anotheraxial period This new axial age will becharacterized by at least these four themesfirst the perpetual revolutionizing of pro-duction technologies has turned into thetechnology of innovation in such a way thatthe generation of capital is relocated to theproduction of new information technologiesand not production and processing of rawmaterials Second because of the almostinstantaneous information transmission andreception across the world and the con-vergence of natural historical and personaltemporalities we have the effect of the de-transcendentalization and temporalization oftradition These de-transcendentalizationsand temporalizations suggest that our imagesof the world will be at the reach of our owndesign In this sense we will be able to speak

of the true secularization of the world and itscomplete humanization Third is the routini-zation and de-metaphysicalization of other-ness brought about by the hyper-urbaniza-tion of humanity Otherness will become aproduct of society and in this sense we willhave to talk of regimes of alterization Thelsquootherrsquo then will become a continuouspresence that will require our constant con-cern and vigilance Fourth is the dissolutionof the boundary between natural and syn-thetic body and tool technology and natureWe will have to speak then of the age inwhich humans have become their own crea-tions and in which the directions of thereproduction of both mind and body cultureand technology will become a concern ofpolitical practice of paramount importance

The image of the world projected byglobalization is one which collapses thedifferences between biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time whatwe see is what we get To put it in thelanguage of an essay by Theodor Adorno thehistory of nature is no different from thehistory of humanity (Adorno 1984) Global-ization also projects an image of the world inwhich otherness is not external and intract-able but produced from within Finallyglobalization is an image of the world inwhich the natural and the social the createdand uncreated have been brought togetherunder the insight that we have been produc-ing ourselves as we have been producingtools to alter the world Now however theproducing of our tools is not different fromthe production of ourselves and our worldIn the image of the world projected byglobalization the world is humanity lookingat itself through its eyes and not the eyes ofa god history or nature

III City of angels

ldquoWho is the observer when it concerns thequestion about the function of religion thesystem of religion itself or science as anexternal observerrdquo (Luhmann 2000 p 118)

20 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

The kind of phenomenology of globalizationthat I sketched above allows us to ask aboutthe kinds of challenges religion faces in anage of globalization For religion appears as aresource of images concepts traditions andpractices that can allow individuals andcommunities to deal with a world that ischanging around them by the hour (Robert-son and Garrett 1991 Luhmann 2000) Inthe new Unubersichtlichkeit [unsurveyabil-ity] of our global society religion appears ascompendium of intuitions that have not beenextinguished by the so-called process ofsecularization (Mendieta forthcoming a)Most importantly however religion cannotbe dismissed or derided because it is theprivileged if not the primary form in whichthe impoverished masses of the invisiblecities of the world (those cities to which Ipointed in the first part of this essay)articulate their hopes as well as critique theirworld

The first challenge to religion that ourphenomenology of globalization allow us toarticulate has to do with the lsquode-transcenden-talizing of othernessrsquo or what I also wouldlike to call the lsquoroutinization of othernessrsquoThere is a correlation between the wayhumanity has conceptualized otherness met-aphysically and conceptually on the onehand and humanityrsquos relationship to real andconcrete otherness as it has been experiencedexistentially and phenomenologically on theother hand This correlation has been medi-ated by humanityrsquos decreasing ruralism Inother words the less rural and thus the moreurban dwelling humans have become theless other is the otherness that we can thinkof or dream up The suggestion is that themetaphysics of alterity that has guided somuch of Western theology and religiousthinking over the last 2000 years has beendetermined by a particular asymmetrybetween the country and the city For thelongest history of humanity most societieshave been farming and rural-dwelling com-munities and associations Contact betweenextremely different communities and societ-ies was sporadic and rare and when contact

did occurred this was meditated by citydwellers and the long memory of popularmythologies But as was noted above in thedawning 21st century most humans will becity dwellers Furthermore In the 21st cen-tury most humanity will be conglomerated inthe mega-urbes of the Third World Underthis circumstance the holy other the abso-lutely other will be deflated Alterity and theextraordinary what can also be called thetremendum are de-mystified and de-met-aphysicalized (Habermas 1992 Placher1996) Either everyone will be a stranger orno one will be because we will all bestrangers in a city of strangers In such asituation otherness will have become a rou-tine an un-extra-ordinary event How thenare we to think divine alterity the othernessof the holy in a situation in which onto-logically and metaphysically all alterity hasbeen deflated demoted rendered normallevelled to the cotidian Are we in a situationof having to ldquorisk a new idea of holinessrdquo asBarry Taylor Pastor at the Sanctuary Churchin Santa Monica put it This would have tobe a holiness which is not other worldly buta holiness which is about the difference anduniqueness of others those who are oureveryday other with whom we ride thesubway with whom we walk the streets ofpopulated mega-urbes of the new age withwhom we share in anonymity the crowdedspaces of the new cities The real andmetaphorical wilderness of the world of itsjungles and forests of its undiscovered con-tinents and untamed seas of its unmappeddeserts and unnavigated rivers were excusesas well instigations to go searching for godbeyond the familial the urbane the too closeand already lsquodomesticatedrsquo God was beyondthe world other than the world Now thequestion is how do we discover the other inthe mundane difference of every fellowhuman being and the crowded city ofstrangers

The second challenge has to do with thecity as locus of the culture of consumptionas the site for an ethos of immediacyhedonism and hyper-excitation Sassen

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 21

speaks of the city as the crossroads of aconfrontation between the flows of capitaland the flows of peoples One of the waysthese flows clash in cities is through theconfrontation between cultures that isbetween different modalities of life Themore people become urban dwellers themore people are exposed to the cornucopiaof cultural possibilities It is not just thatmore people are in cities it is also that morepeople are seeking to participate in thestandards of life promised by urban dwellingThe challenges are unprecedented We arepresently choking in our own refuse in ourown garbage The psychological toil mustalso be unprecedented The level of unmetexpectations unfilled desires the gapbetween universally promised but exorbi-tantly expensive commodities that shatteredself-images and worth and that are availableto a relatively small fraction of the worldpopulation has grown exponentially Thereis another underside to the city as thecrossroads of the clash of modalities of lifeThe more cities grow the more they exerttheir pull on the so-called hinterland therural areas The more agriculture is mecha-nized and industrialized the more we adoptbiotechnology the more superfluous ldquofarm-ersrdquo become At the same time the expansionof telecommunications television and paidfor television and satellite connections havemade it easier to link up and peer into theldquotube of plentyrdquo to use that wonderfulphrase by Erik Barnouw (1990 [1975]) Thecity literally and metaphorically consumes itshinterland its outlying areas of supply itconsumes its resources and produce but alsoits cultures and its peoples

It is perhaps unnecessary to underscoreagain that most of the consumption of ruralresources is taking place in the metropolisesof the so-called First World So not onlymust we address the rampant and rapaciousconsumerism of cities in general but also theparticularly scandalous and grotesque asym-metry between the consumption of FirstWorld cities and Third World cities Thisissue becomes particularly pressing when in

the so-called advanced nations of the worldwe have thinkers intellectuals and criticstalking about a politics and culture of inclu-sion and tolerance (Habermas 1998) Thispolitics of inclusion is articulated with thebest intentions in mind The assumptionguiding it is that people throughout theworld would be better if they could partici-pate more equitably in the same kinds of so-called basic needs and luxuries that wewesterners enjoy But there is somethingprofoundly disingenuous and deleteriouslynaotildeve about such a view In some cases thepoverty of those across the world to whomwe would like to extend our standard ofliving is due precisely to our luxury Thatwhich we want to share is the cause of theprivation we want to alleviate Thus perhapsthe agenda should not be one of inclusionbut of dismantling the system that occa-sioned in the first place the exclusions webenefited and continue to benefit from

In this situation then the challengebecomes how to think of an urban culture offrugality The challenge is how to translatethe religious message and teaching of povertyas a holy way as a holy calling into a secularvalue a secular calling Another way ofputting it would be how do we translate thevisions of the desert fathers St Francis ofAssisi Mohandas Gandhi into an urbanvision for a spiritually starving youth Oralternatively if we think of what ArnoldToynbee and Eric Hobsbawn said about the20th century namely that its greatestachievement was the expansion of the middleclass then the goal for the 21st centuryshould be the expansion of a globalizedldquoliving level classrdquo In other words we haveto develop a culture for which the greatestachievement is not that everyone else will livelike us but that we will live at the level thatallows the most people to share in the mostfundamental goods potable water clean airinfant nutrition to sustain healthy standardsof unstunted growth and the possibility ofbasic education Here I would have to saythat I concur with Hardt and Negri on theircanonization of Assisi as a saint in the

22 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

hagiography of revolutionary militancy(2000 p 413)

The third challenge that our phenomenol-ogy of globalization allows us to elucidate hasto do with one of its central locus of analysisnamely the city If cities have become the siteswhere the unbundling of the state takes placethat is if we take cities to be the sites for thede-nationalizing of the national and if we atthe same time take the city as the locus of anemergent juridification or process of legal-ization of new forms of relationships then arewe not in need of having to re-think therelationship between the legal and politicalstructures of the emergent supra-nationalstate and the para- or extra-statist ldquochurchrdquoAnother way of putting it would be to notethat the church at least in the West antecedesthe modern nation-state In fact the churchwas the state and that partly because of thisthe quest for modernity the process ofmodernization entailed a secularization ofstate and legal structures In the process thechurchrsquos sphere of operation becamerestricted or constrained by the spaces drawnby the boundaries of nation-states Churchesand denominations became identified withnational boundaries which took place not-withstanding the underlying and fundamentaluniversalist thrust of Christianity If weaccept Sassenrsquos analysis which we must giventhe overwhelming evidence then we areinescapably put in the situation of having tore-think the relationship between the churchand the state In fact as the nation-states of the19th and 20th century are unbundled andnew forms of political and legal rights emergein de-territorialized and de-nationalizedforms of political self-determination then thechurch itself will have to face its de-national-ization and de-territorialization At the sametime however one of the fundamental condi-tions of the presence of the church in the 21stcentury will have to be that it must havelearned the lessons of the last 500 years ofcolonialism imperialism and post-colonial-ism This means that the challenge is dual Onthe one hand the new church must find aplace beyond the nation-states of political

modernity but on the other hand it must doso with a post-colonialist and post-imperialistattitude In the age of global transformationsthe new church cannot and will not be able toserve as an agent of globalization for the newimperial masters that began to profile them-selves in the horizon namely a united front ofEuropean nations (an expanded NATO) atechnological elite bent on re-designingnature and a cosmopolitan nobility withoutcontrols allegiances or consciences

Fourth and finally I think that anotherextremely important challenge has to do withthe insight that cities are the places wherecultures come to cultivate each other Inother words cities are the places where oldcultures are cannibalized but also carniv-alized where old cultures which are dyingcome to be renewed but also where newcultures are produced from the remains ofold ones (Hamacher 1997) Cities are germi-nals of new cultures Indeed just as we arevery likely to find micro-climates in mostglobal cities we are likely to find culturalenclaves little Italys Chinatowns Japan-towns little Bombays etc These places arewhere the centripetal and centrifugal forcesof homogenization and heterogenizationinteract to produce new cultural formationsUnderlying this new cultural genesis is itsevident and almost presentist character Theprocesses of cultural genesis take place rightin front of our eyes Cultures are notmillennial sedimentations and even thatwhich is peddled as the oldest is a present-day version of the old Most importantlycultures have become something we produceand choose cultures are something which weeither nurture and preserve or abandon anddisavow In all of these cases we are notpassive but active agents of transformationIn this situation the challenge for the newchurch for an urban ministry for the 21stcentury is how to develop an ecclesiology ofcultural diversity How will the new churchparticipate in this cultural genesis that isgerminating in global cities while retaining asense of identity Or conversely how will itretain a sense of cultural identity without

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 23

becoming either ethnocentric or jingoisticabout its cultural bequest without contribut-ing to the ossification of its own culture Onwhat terms can the new church participate inthe creation of new cultures and the preser-vation of successful ones

Conclusion

Cities are the vortex of the convergence ofthe processes of globalization and local-ization Cities are epitomes of glocalizationto use Robertsonrsquos language (1994) They arealso sites of the sedimentation of history Inthis essay I have sough to advance theresearch agenda that would take the ldquoinvisi-ble citiesrdquo of the so-called Third World astheir primary object of analysis At the sametime however I have urged that we look atthe cities in the developed industrializedworld through the eyes of their invisibleinhabitants and citizens immigrants ethnicminorities disenfranchised groups workerswomen and the youth There are invisiblecities within the cities that are so visible inmost urban theory and analysis as well asinvisible cities that remain unseen becausethey are not on the horizon of the academicagendas of researchers in the universities ofthe developed world

In tandem I have suspended judgementon whether to be for or against global-ization not because I do not think that wecan make moral judgments in this case butbecause I think we need to broaden ouranalyses of this new order of things Ideveloped some general points of departurefor a phenomenological analysis of global-ization This particular approach I thinkexhibits how ldquoglobalizationrdquo can and oughtto become a matter for serious philosophicalreflection I have identified the issues ofalterity temporality tradition the distinc-tion between the natural and the syntheticas philosophemes that are substantivelyimpacted by the processes of globalizationYet the phenomenological approach Iarticulate is deliberate in assuming a partic-

ular perspective or angle of approach I havesought to delineate a phenomenology ofglobalization from below The world doesnot disclose itself in the same way to allsubjects much less globalization Thus thephenomenology here presented urges us tolook at the world from below from theperspective of those who seem to be moreadversely than beneficially affected by theprocesses that make up globalization

This is what the ldquobelowrdquo in the subtitle ofthe essay pointed to the below of the poorand destitute the below of those who are notseen and do not register in the radar of socialtheory Furthermore I have tried to furtherqualify that perspective from below byfocusing my attention on the issue of reli-gion Religion clearly can mean manythings but at the very least it means ldquothe sighof the oppressedrdquo and the ldquoencyclopediccompendiumrdquo of a heartless world as Marxput it (1994 p 28) if only because it is theform in which the destitute the most vulner-able in our world express their critiques aswell as hopes I have argued that we ought tolook at cities as germinals of new culturesand that if we want to trace the emergentcultures of those ldquobelowrdquo then we betterlook at religious movements In what waysare the religious language of the oppressedand disenfranchised of the invisible cities ofglobalization critiques and resistances toglobalization This is clearly a researchdesideratum rather than a description oreven assessment

Note

1 I want to thank Bob Catterall for encouraging me towrite this article and for his comments on earlyversions of it I also want to thank Lois AnnLorentzen and Nelson Maldonado Torres who readit with great care and made substantive suggestionscorrections and criticisms that have made meunderstand better my own project I also want tothank Enrique Dussel Jurgen Habermas WalterMignolo and Santiago Castro-Gomez with whom Ihave discussed many of the ideas here developedand who have given me impetus to continue alongthis line with their own pioneering works

24 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Bibliography

Adorno TW (1984) lsquoThe idea of natural historyrsquo Telos60 pp 31ndash42

Amin S (1996) Capitalism in the Age of GlobalizationThe Management of Contemporary Society Londonand New York Zed Books

Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large CulturalDimensions of Globalization MinneapolisUniversity of Minnesota Press

Appiah KA (1992) In My Fatherrsquos House Africa in thePhilosophy of Culture New York Oxford UniversityPress

Aronowitz S (2000) The Knowledge FactoryDismantling the Corporate University and CreatingTrue Higher Learning Boston Beacon Press

Barber BR (1995) Jihad vs McWorld How Globalismand Tribalism are Reshaping the World New YorkBallantine Books

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1993) lsquoA globalizingeconomy some implications and consequencesrsquo inB Mazlish and R Buultjens (eds) ConceptualizingGlobal History pp 153ndash172 Boulder COWestview Press

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1994) Global DreamsImperial Corporations and the New World OrderNew York Simon amp Schuster

Barnouw E (1990 [1975]) Tube of Plenty TheEvolution of American Television New YorkOxford University Press

Baudrillard J (1981) For a Critique of the PoliticalEconomy of the Sign St Louis MO Telos Press

Bauman Z (1998a) Globalization The HumanConsequences New York Columbia UniversityPress

Bauman Z (1998b) lsquoPostmodern religionrsquo in P Heelas(ed) Religion Modernity and PostmodernityCambridge Blackwell

Beck U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung Frankfurt amMain Suhrkamp

Bell D (1976) The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism New York Basic Books

Benford G (1999) Deep Time How HumanityCommunicates Across Millenia New York AvonBooks Inc

Beyer P (1994) Religion and Globalization LondonSage

Brahm Jr G and Driscoll M (eds) (1995) ProstheticTerritories Politics and Hypertechnologies BoulderCO Westview

Bretherton C and Ponton G (eds) (1996) GlobalPolitics An Introduction Cambridge Blackwell

Calvino I (1974) Invisible Cities New York HarcourtBrace Jovanovich

Casanova J (1994) Public Religions in the ModernWorld Chicago University of Chicago Press

Castells M (1996ndash8) The Information Age EconomySociety and Culture Vol 1 The Rise of the

Network Society Vol 2 The Power of Identity Vol3 End of Millenium Malden MA and OxfordBlackwell Publishers

Chaunu P (1974) Historie science sociale la dureelrsquoespace et lrsquohomme a lrsquoepoque moderne ParisSociete drsquoedition drsquoenseignement superieur

Clark RP (1997) The Global Imperative AnInterpretative History of the Spread of HumankindBoulder CO Westview Press

Costello P (1993) World Historians and Their GoalsTwentieth-century Answers to Modernism DeKalbNorthern Illinois University Press

Dawkins K (1997) Gene Wars The Politics ofBiotechnology New York Seven Stories Press

de Benoist A (1996) lsquoConfronting globalizationrsquo Telos108 pp 117ndash137

Dussel E (1998) Etica de la Liberacion en la edad deglobalizacion y de la exclusion Madrid EditorialTrotta

Elias N (1992) Time An Essay Cambridge MA BasilBlackwell

Featherstone M (1995) Undoing CultureGlobalization Postmodernism and Identity LondonSage Publications

Fritsche J (1999) Historical Destiny and NationalSocialism in Heideggerrsquos Being and Time Berkeleyand Los Angeles University of California Press

Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of SocietyCambridge Polity Press

Giddens A (1987) Social Theory and ModernSociology Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of ModernityCambridge Polity Press

Gray J (1998) False Dawn The Delusions of GlobalCapitalism London Granta Books

Grossberg L (1999) lsquoSpeculations and articulations ofglobalizationrsquo Polygraph 11 pp 11ndash48

Habermas J (1992) Postmetaphysical ThinkingPhilosophical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (1998) The Inclusion of the Other Studiesin Political Theory Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (2001) The Postnational ConstellationPolitical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Hall Sir Peter (1998) Cities in Civilization New YorkPantheon Books

Hamacher W (1997) lsquoOne 2 many multiculturalismsrsquoin H de Vries and S Weber (eds) ViolenceIdentity and Self-determination Stanford CAStanford University Press

Haraway D (1991) Simians Cyborgs and WomenThe Reinvention of Nature New York Routledge

Hardt M and Negri A (2000) Empire CambridgeMA Harvard University Press

Harvey D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity AnEnquiry into the Origins of Cultural ChangeCambridge MA Basil Blackwell

Hayles NK (1999) How we Became PosthumanVirtual Bodies in Cybernetics Literature and

12 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

cultural and political processes which in turncondition the horizon of all possible expecta-tions against which new experiences arepossible at all

Human experience happens against a spa-tio-temporal background the life-world Atthe same time human experience projectsitself forward into a horizon of expectationsthat is conditioned by the structures of thelife-world Human experience therefore isalways framed or structured by spatial andtemporal co-ordinates Ideas of the world orworld-views are coagulations of those spa-tio-temporal configurations (Giddens 19841987) Images of the world or world-imagesare ways in which we understand our rela-tionships to space and time For this reasonthe way we conceptualize the world imaginethe world mirrors the way we conceptualizeourselves as humans The point of thesereflections is to begin to think of global-ization as a way of viewing the world as animage of the world (Heidegger 1977) And tothis extent then globalization acquires aphilosophical status that requires a phenom-enological analysis (Jameson 1998)

In the following I would like to describewhat I take to be fundamental elements of aphenomenology of globalization I discussfour points of departure for a phenomenol-ogy of globalization from the perspective ofthose most adversely affected by the impactsand transformations unleashed by global-ization It is also clear that they betray aWestern perspective although one which isconscious of the privilege and narrownessthat underwrites and supports it

First any phenomenology of globalizationwill have to begin with the descriptionanalysis and study of the exponential accel-eration of the production and disseminationof information Of course information is notknowledge Knowledge might be broadlydefined as ldquoa set of organized statements offacts or ideas presenting a reasoned judg-ment or an experimental result which istransmitted to others through some commu-nication medium rdquo (see Castells 1996 Vol1 p 17 n 27) Information on the other

hand presupposes knowledge and dataMore precisely information is the commu-nication of knowledge and data in such away that the latter has to be discriminatedfrom the former Data are made up of rawstatements and experimental results withoutthe reasoned judgment No one will deny theleaps in knowledge acquisition and informa-tion transmission that have taken place overthe last 50 years since the atom bomb wasfirst invented and exploded over desert atLos Alamos It is this glaring transformationof our knowledge of the world ourselves andthe cosmos in general that has incited someto call this the ldquoinformation agerdquo

If we follow Karl Jaspers as well asPierre Chaunu and Ferdinand Braudel wemight suggest that every major epochaltransformation in human consciousness wascatalysed by transformations in the meansof acquisition of knowledge and its com-munication through different media ortools of information The axial period ofwhich Jaspers spoke in his work on TheOrigin and Goal of History which tookplace between the 6th and 2nd centuriesbefore Christ had to do with the inventionof books the development of major citiesand the expansion of networks of economicexchange in terms of trade routes (Jaspers1953) At this time however paper andbooks were fragile expensive and to a largeextent tools of luxury and privilegeKnowledge of the world was guided bymythological world-views which were con-trolled by almost unassailable authoritiesThe 16th century another axial age wasmarked by the printing revolution inaugu-rated by Gutenberg the establishment ofnew trade routes and the secularization ofknowledge production and distributionwith the emergence of philosophers andintellectuals

The 20th century has marked yet anothershift in the way we produce and distributeknowledge and disseminate it as informa-tion One of the greatest unsung and neglec-ted triumphs of the 20th century has beenthe institutionalization of mass education

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 13

Many have been the horrors that havevisited cultures through their encounterwith the nation-state but one of the clearbenefits of this encounter has been thedevelopment of mass literacy and the estab-lishment of education institutions that are ifnot de facto at least nominally open to allcitizens of the state Talcott Parsons calledthis achievement of the nation-state theeducational revolution Amartya Sen forinstance has urged us to measure absolutepoverty in terms of the years of schoolingalong with access to potable water qualityof air and access to minimally nutritiousfood (Sen 1999) But this is only the leastnoticeable although perhaps the mostimportant aspect of the information revolu-tion of the 20th century The most notice-able is of course the computer and tele-communications revolutions Jeremy Rifkinhas appropriately suggested that we talk interms of the ldquobio-tech centuryrdquo and that weunderstand that the genetic computer andtelecommunications revolutions are differ-ent flanks of one same front the informa-tion revolution (Rifkin 1998) DNA wasdiscovered by Watson and Crick in 1953 in1990 the USA launched the Genome proj-ect by the turn of the third millennium theentire human genome plus the genetic makeup of the most important foods will becontrolled by a few multinationals (Daw-kins 1997) In the USA already over 25of the grain produced is genetically engi-neered Presently one of the most impor-tant conflicts between the USA and Europesince the deployment of missiles throughoutWestern Europe during the 1960s and 1980sis brewing over the import of geneticallyaltered produce and meats You might wantto call this bio-tech imperialism but youmay also call it the carrying out to itslogical conclusion of the ldquoagricultural revo-lutionrdquo (Shiva 1991 1997 1999) Similarlythe computer was invented during the1940s but only began to be mass producedin the 1970s Today any laptop has morecomputational power than all of the com-puters of the first generation put together

Micro-chips are superseded every 18months with each new cycle increasingexponentially the speed memory and con-centration of micro-processors In 1957 theRussians launched Sputnik the first artificialsatellite the Americans followed in 1962with the launching of Telstar 1 the firsttelevision satellite Today there are morethan 200 satellites forming a canopy ofelectric nodes linking the world in a net ofsynchronous telecommunications It is pro-jected that by the first decade of the nextmillennium there will be more than 300satellites (National Geographic 1999)

One of the fundamental characteristics ofthe modern world is that the extraction ofraw materials and their transformation intocommodities has been demoted from itsplace of privilige in bourgeois capitalism bythe production of scientific knowledge andits dissemination as information This is whatthe information revolution amounts tonamely the superseding of the industrialrevolution by the transformation both in themeans and object of production (Baudrillard1981 Lash and Urry 1994 Lowe 1995)Today what matters is not the raw materialand the possession of the means of produc-tion instead what matters is the knowledgethat allows one to discover even invent rawmaterials which are processed through ever-changing means of production The clearestexample of this is the bio-tech industrywhere Monsanto is the perfect illustration ofthe supervening of raw materials and meansof production by the production of knowl-edge that controls seeds and how they areprocessed (Lappe and Bailey 1998 Rifkin1998)

Second the acceleration of the productionand information dissemination has had adirect and evident impact on the way wethink about history and tradition The dura-bility and unifying role of our world-viewsor images of the world is a function of therelationship between our individual bodilyexperience of space and time and the way theworld surrounding us itself undergoeschange The world around us in turn is

14 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

made up of the social world and the naturalworld Each one has its own rhythms andtime (Kubler 1962 Elias 1992 Heidegger1992 Benford 1999) In light of this weshould speak of a biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time (Wal-lerstein 1991) Biomorphic space-time is theway space and time are experienced by theindividual The clock that measures thisspace-time might be said to be the biologicalclock of each human being Social space-timeis what social groups societies communitieslive and experience This space-time is meas-ured in generations historical processesevents the rise and fall of cities The motor ofthis space-time is the level of socio-technicaldevelopment of a society its infra-structuresand super-structures World space-time is thepace at which the natural world evolves andtransforms seasons come and go rivers runand dry up mountains erode plains dry upand become deserts and forests are cut downand grow up or turn into shrubbery andwasteland The further back we look in thehistory of humanity the more disjointed andseparate were the rhythms at which thesedifferent clocks ran and operated

Today there is a convergence of the speedsof these different space-times If we comparethe speed of world space-time and bio-morphic space-time we find that they arerunning almost simultaneously In otherwords the more our own life-spans arelengthened and world space-time the timeor speed at which the world itself changesshrinks the more unstable and local are ourworld-views or images of the world Cosmo-logical views as well as abstract universalitywere able to be sustained as long as the worlddid not seem not to change and humans hadsuch short life-spans that any substantivechange in the world was not noticeable andexperienceable by any two or three genera-tions Pierre Chaunu (1974) remarked thatone of the fundamental elements in thepossibility for the communication of knowl-edge was the lengthening of the life-spans ofhumans during and after the 16th centuryToday we have the convergence of unprece-

dented human life-spans (to the extent thatsome societies are registering the divergentvectors of the general ageing of their popula-tions and the lowering of infant mortalitywhere both are clearly a function of theimprovement in general medicine and itshaving been made more broadly available)with unprecedentedly accelerated worldchanges The latter is not simply a meremirage occasioned by almost synchronousworld communication It is the case that weare changing the face of the planet in waysthat not just generations but individuals areable to note and distinctly remember In thisway we can talk about the malleability oftradition and the arbitrariness of history Inother words what Harvey and Giddenscalled respectively the compression and col-lapse of space-time manifests itself in thecontemporary plurification of historicalmethodologies and re-narrativation of histo-ries as well as the skepticism that anyhistorical chronology is not a function ofsome ideological agenda Historical revisionhas become the daily bread of the historicallycynical masses of peoples who cannot read inhistory the telos of either emancipation orrationality In the age of globalization reasondoes not entail freedom nor revolution free-dom nor reason revolution In this way wecan say with Heelas Lash and Morris that welive in an post-traditional or de-tradition-alized world in which these notations thatgave cohesion and direction to the project ofmodernity have been superseded or ren-dered ideological and historicized (Heelas etal 1996)

Third any phenomenology of globaliza-tion must also begin with what I take to be anequally momentous transformation ofhuman societies and this has to do with themega-urbanization of the world We can saythat for most of its history most of humanityhas been rural Cities developed as append-ages to large agricultural areas Cities werefunctional principles of rural areas Even-tually this relationship reversed but onlyafter the city ceased to be a communicationnode for agricultural exchange Cities started

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 15

to acquire their independence when theycould produce their own commoditiesnamely knowledge and political power Thisonly began to happen after the Renaissancewhen major cities were not just ports but alsocentres of learning culture and politicalpower (Hall 1998) This trend howeveronly takes off when industrialization allowscities to become their own productive cen-tres even if they still remain tied to ruralcentres The reversal of the relationshipbetween rural and urban areas howeverbegan to shift in the 1950s during these yearsalready 30 of all humanity lived in citiesThe United Nations projects that by the year2005 50 of humanity will live in citiesHere we must pause and reflect that thismeans that a substantive part of humanitywill still remain rural and that most of thoselsquofarmersrsquo and lsquopeasantsrsquo will be in so-calledThird World countries Nonetheless as EricHobsbawn remarked in his work The Age ofExtremes the ldquomost dramatic and far-reach-ing social change of the second half of the[the twentieth century] is the death of thepeasantryrdquo (Hobsbawn 1994 p 289) Theother side of this reversal of the relationshipbetween city and country is that most mega-cities will be in what is called the ThirdWorld By the third millennium the 10 mostpopulated metropolises of the World will beneither in Europe nor in the USA

These trends can be attributed to a varietyof factors The most important factor in theelimination of the rural is the industrializa-tion of agriculture a process that reached itszenith with the so-called ldquogreen revolutionrdquoof the 1950s and 1960s Under the industrial-ization of agriculture we must understandnot just the introduction of better tools butthe homogenization of agricultural produc-tion by which I mean the introduction on aglobal scale of the mono-cultivo (Shiva1993) We must also include here the elimina-tion of self-subsistent forms of farmingthrough the elimination of self-renewing bio-diverse eco-systems One of the most effec-tive ways however in which the city hasimposed itself over the countryside is

through the projection of images that desta-bilized the sense of tradition and culturalcontinuity so fundamental to the rhythms ofthe countryside Through television radioand now the internet the city assaults thefabric of the countryside Tradition is under-mined by the promises and riches projectedby the tube of plenty the cornucopia of otherpossibilities the television and its world ofinfo-tainment (see Baumanrsquos wonderful dis-cussion of how under the globalization ofentertainment the Benthamian Panopticonturns into the MacWorldInfotainment Syn-opticon (1998a pp 53ndash54))

Indeed one of the most characteristicaspects of globalization is what is called thedecreasing importance of the local the statethe national We therefore need to speakwith Jurgen Habermas and Paul Kennedy ofa post-national constellation in which sover-eign nation-states as territorially localizedhave become less important less in controlof their own spatiality (Kennedy 1993Habermas 2001) But what is forgotten isthat there is a simultaneous process oflocalization in which place acquires a newsignificance certain spaces of course (Feath-erstone 1995) The city is the site at whichthe forces of the local and the global meetthe site where the forces of transnationalfinance capital and the local labour marketsand national infra-structures enter into con-flict and contestation over the city AsSaskia Sassen writes

ldquoThe city has indeed emerged as a site fornew claims by global capital which uses thecity as an lsquoorganizational commodityrsquo butalso by disadvantage sectors of the urbanpopulation which in large cities arefrequently as internationalized a presence asis capital The denationalizing of urbanspace and the formation of new claims bytransnational actors and involvingcontestation raise the questionmdashwhose cityis itrdquo (Sassen 1998 p xx)

The city in fact has become the crossroadfor new denationalizing politics in whichglobal actors capitals and moving peoples

16 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

enter into conflict across a transnationalurban system

Habermas has noted with acuity that oneof the characteristics of the 18th and 19thcenturies was their pronounced fears of theldquomassrdquo ldquothe crowdrdquo (Habermas 2001 p39) Such fears were summarized in the titleof the prescient work by Ortega y GassetThe Revolt of the Masses (1985) As wasnoted already the 18th and the 19th centuriessignalled the reversal of the relationshipbetween countryside and city This reversalmeant the rapid urbanization and demo-graphic explosion in cities which accompanythe rapid industrialization of certain metro-polises of the West London Berlin NewYork Chicago Newark Mexico City PortoAlegre and the non-West New DehliTokyo Beijing Cairo etc Urbanization andIndustrialization gave rise to the spectre ofthe irascible insatiable uncontrollable massthat would raze everything in its path Threeclassical responses emerged Sorel and thecelebration of the creative power of anar-chical and explosive unorganized mass mobi-lization the Marxist-Leninist and theattempt to domesticate and train the creativeand transformative power of social unrestthrough the development of a party machin-ery that would guide the ire and discontentof gathered masses of unemployed andemployed workers and the conservative andreactionary response of an Edmund Burkebut which is also echoed in the works ofphilosophers like Heidegger which dis-dained and vilified the common folk themass in a simple term Das Man The crowdthe mass is consumed and distracted byprattle and curiosity as it wallows in themiasma of inauthenticity and cowardness(Fritsche 1999)

Today such attitudes seem not just foreignbut also unrealistic Most of our experience isdetermined by a continuous mingling withcrowds and large undifferentiated masses ofpeople We get on the road and we areconfronted with traffic jams we get on thesubway and people accost and touch us fromall directions We live in continuous friction

with the stranger the other May we suggestthat the ldquoOtherrdquo has become such an impor-tant point of departure for philosophicalreflection precisely because we exist in such acontinuous propinquity with it Indeed theOther is no longer simply a phantasmagor-ical presence projected and barely discern-ible beyond the boundaries of the ecumenethe polis and the frontiers of the nation-stateAt the same time the discourse about theldquootherrdquo what is called the politics of alteritymarks a shift from the negative discourse ofanxiety and fear epitomized in the termldquoanomierdquo so well diagnosed by DurkheimSimmel and Freud and so aptly described byChristopher Lasch (1979) to the positivediscourse of solidarity inclusion acceptancetolerance citizenship and justice so welldiagnosed and described by Zymunt Bauman(1998b) Ulrich Beck (1997) Anthony Gid-dens (1990) and Jurgen Habermas (2001)

Are there any morals to be extracted fromthis profound transformation in the wayhumanity in general understands itself Forthe longest period of the history of human-kind groups remained both sheltered fromand inured to otherness by the solidity andstability of their traditions and their worldsCultures remained fairly segregated maps ofthe world in which the foreign strange andunknown was relegated beyond the bound-aries of the controllable and surveyable Tothis extent lsquoothernessrsquo was legislated over byreligion the state nature and even historynamely those centres of gravity of cultureand images of the world In an age in whichall traditions are under constant revision andhuman temporality converges with the age ofthe world itself then lsquoothernessrsquo appearsbefore us as naked unmediated otherness weare all others before each other In otherwords neither our sense of identity nor thesense of difference of the other are given apriori they are always discovered consti-tuted and dismantled in the very processes ofencounter The other was always constitutedfor us by extrinsic forces Now the other isconstituted in the very process of our iden-tity formation but in a contingent fashion

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 17

We make others as we make ourselves Thisreflection links up with some insights thatEnrique Dussel has had with respect to therelationship between the emergence of citiesand the development of the first codes ofethics the Hammurabi Code and the BookN of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Dussel1998) Such codes arose precisely becauseindividuals were thrown into the proximityof each other and were thus confronted witheach otherrsquos vulnerability and injurabilityThe injuction to take care of the poor theindigent the orphan the widow the invalidcould only arise out of the urban experienceof the contiguity with the injurable flesh ofthe stranger Today the experience of theindigent other is of the immigrant the exiledthe refugee who build their enclaves in theshadows of the glamorous city of transna-tional capital (King 1990 Sassen 1999) Forthis reason the other and the immigrant areinterchangeable but this also raises the issueof the new global city as a space for therepresentation and formation of post-colo-nial identities Geo-cities are spaces for thereconfiguration of image the imaginationand the imaginary as Arjun Appaduraiargued (1996) In this sense the centrality ofthe urban experience for humanity meansthat otherness is not going to be a meremetaphysical or even phenomenological cat-egory and concern Under the reign of thecity Otherness has become quotidian andpractical

Fourth another fundamental point ofdeparture for a phenomenology of global-ization will have to be the analysis of theplace of technology in our everyday lives Iwould like to understand technology in twosenses First in its broadest sense as ldquothe useof scientific knowledge to specify ways ofdoing things in a reproducible wayrdquo (Bell1976 p 29) Second as a prosthesis of thehuman body Technology to paraphrase awonderful aphorism of William Burroughsis the mind wanting more body I will discussfirst the former sense of technology as ascientific specification for the iterable way ofdoing things In this sense then a hospital is

a social technology like agriculture and cattleraising are material technologies By the sametoken prisons asylums and ghettos are socialtechnologies There is however somethingunique about technology in the 20th centuryand that is that technology itself has becomean object of technology in other words theuse of science in order to produce ever moreefficient ways of doing things in ever morereproducible ways itself has become a tech-nological quest This technology of technol-ogy is what one might call the institutional-ization of invention Alfred NorthWhitehead noted that ldquothe greatest inventionof the 19th century was the invention of themethod of inventionrdquo (Whitehead 1925 p141) What Whitehead attributes to the 19thcentury reached its true apogee in the secondhalf of the 20th century with the institu-tionalization of the research universityWhile the programme of the research uni-versity goes back to the German ideal of theuniversity it is in the USA that this ideagained its highest formalization and statesupport Without question we have to attrib-ute the greatest technological breakthroughsof the 20th century to this unique con-vergence of the state the military and theresearch university what Eisenhower calledthe militaryndashindustrial complex and whatwe now with hindsight should more appro-priately call the militaryndashuniversityndashindus-trial complex (Kenney 1986 Aronowitz2000)

The rise of the nation-state also signifiedthe rise of state-sponsored education and thestate university The university plays a dualrole On the one hand it has the function ofpreparing citizens and workers for the mate-rial and cultural-political self-reproductionof society On the other it has the role ofinstitutionalizing scientific investigation theinvention of invention Through the uni-versity the state invests in its future ability totransform its material technologies of self-reproduction Winning Nobel prizes is notjust a matter of pride it is above all aquestion of institutional power to supportimmense research budgets whose actual

18 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

industrial and technical application might befar off into the future This is one of thereasons why the USA has remained a worldpower despite its apparent military stale-mate namely because it still remains thecentre for the production of most techno-logical innovation

Related to the invention of invention whatI called the institutionalization of the tech-nology of technology as its other side is theinterpenetration of technology in everyaspect of our lives Even those who are notdirectly affected by technological revolutionsin their daily life are nonetheless indirectlyaffected insofar as their worlds economiesand cultures are made vulnerable to take-overs and colonization by those who drivethe technological revolutions of today Forthe longest period of the history of humanitytechnology remained distant from the livesand bodies of men and women not because itdid not impact them but because it did sosporadically and in such tangential ways firethe wheel the printing press the metalplough the steam engine the automobileEach technological innovation however hasmeant a further interpenetration betweentool and human body With this I turn to thediscussion of technology as prosthesis thesecond sense of technology I want to con-sider in light of a phenomenology ofglobalization

A technology is a way of doing things inways that can be reproduced again andagain and that therefore can be taught andpassed on Culture is in this sense the mostcomplex and important technology of all Inthis sense a technology is a way for asociety to extend itself across time fromgeneration to generation century to century(Giddens 1984 1987) A technology gen-erally instantiated itself in tools Tools allowparticular individuals to reach beyond theboundaries of their own bodies A tool is anextension of a particular bodily organ thataugments its original performance Tool andbody however have remained relatively dis-tinct even if one can claim that the hand isa product of our invention of tools

(Rothenberg 1993) Recognition of the dis-tinctness between tool and body does notentail the negation of their dialectical inter-dependence and co-modification Their dis-tinctness was sustained by what I havealready referred to above as the temporalityof humans and the time of the world Whenthe time of humans and the world convergewhat mediates their encounter tools hasalready fused with the body or has alreadymade the world immediate Our experienceof the world is already so mediated by ourtechnological tools that we cannot distin-guish the world from the tool and thesefrom the body We are our tools We are ourtechnological prosthesis because they arethe world (Brahm and Driscoll 1995) Butthis does not mean that technology is itselftransparent Rather technology itself hasbecome like our bodies in the sense that wedo not know how our livers hearts orbrains work we just assume that they willdo what they were designed to do and ifthey break down then we go to aspecialist

Everywhere we are surrounded by techno-logical devices which have insinuated them-selves in our lives and without which wecannot do the watch the telephone the carthe television but also toothpaste X-raysvaccines birth control pills condoms sunscreen eye-glasses shavers purified andchlorinated water and so on

What I am talking about can be illustratedby comparing Mary Shelleyrsquos Frankensteinin which a creation out of human partsbecomes monstrous precisely because itentails the complete instrumentalization ofour bodies and thus a sacrilage of its allegeddivine naturalness and Donna Harawayrsquosborgs which demonstrate and theorize towhat extent we are always already synthetic(Haraway 1991) There is no nature outsidethe confines of the laboratory Resistance isfutile to the logic of technology because weare all already borg we are products of ourtechnologies and nature exists only as anArcadian fantasy This reading should not betaken to be suggesting that nature does not

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 19

exist in the sense that it is a fiction the mirageof radical social constructivism Rather thepoint is to highlight the ways in which natureis to be thought of in terms of what today wecall the lsquorecursive loopsrsquo between technologyand nature in which nature is already anlsquoartefactrsquo and lsquomachinesrsquo are natural (Hayles1999) Indeed appropriating Marxrsquos languagefrom his 1844 manuscripts we have to talkabout the humanization of machines and themechanization of humanity

Is there a moral to be extracted by theinterpenetration of humans and their techno-logical prosthesis to the point that youcannot distinguish them any longer I wouldsay that a Heideggerian response to thisquestion is anachronistic and indefensibleOn the other hand a dia-mat in the sense ofEngelsrsquos dialectical materialism will not doeither Science is neither metaphysically badnor a malleable ideological epiphenomenonAgainst these two positions I would advo-cate what has been called Kranzbergrsquos lawwhich reads ldquotechnology is neither good norbad nor is it neutralrdquo (Castells 1996 Vol 1p 65)

I would like to summarize my reflectionsby suggesting that once a phenomenology ofglobalization takes seriously the points ofdeparture discussed above we will discoverthat globalization might stand for anotheraxial period This new axial age will becharacterized by at least these four themesfirst the perpetual revolutionizing of pro-duction technologies has turned into thetechnology of innovation in such a way thatthe generation of capital is relocated to theproduction of new information technologiesand not production and processing of rawmaterials Second because of the almostinstantaneous information transmission andreception across the world and the con-vergence of natural historical and personaltemporalities we have the effect of the de-transcendentalization and temporalization oftradition These de-transcendentalizationsand temporalizations suggest that our imagesof the world will be at the reach of our owndesign In this sense we will be able to speak

of the true secularization of the world and itscomplete humanization Third is the routini-zation and de-metaphysicalization of other-ness brought about by the hyper-urbaniza-tion of humanity Otherness will become aproduct of society and in this sense we willhave to talk of regimes of alterization Thelsquootherrsquo then will become a continuouspresence that will require our constant con-cern and vigilance Fourth is the dissolutionof the boundary between natural and syn-thetic body and tool technology and natureWe will have to speak then of the age inwhich humans have become their own crea-tions and in which the directions of thereproduction of both mind and body cultureand technology will become a concern ofpolitical practice of paramount importance

The image of the world projected byglobalization is one which collapses thedifferences between biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time whatwe see is what we get To put it in thelanguage of an essay by Theodor Adorno thehistory of nature is no different from thehistory of humanity (Adorno 1984) Global-ization also projects an image of the world inwhich otherness is not external and intract-able but produced from within Finallyglobalization is an image of the world inwhich the natural and the social the createdand uncreated have been brought togetherunder the insight that we have been produc-ing ourselves as we have been producingtools to alter the world Now however theproducing of our tools is not different fromthe production of ourselves and our worldIn the image of the world projected byglobalization the world is humanity lookingat itself through its eyes and not the eyes ofa god history or nature

III City of angels

ldquoWho is the observer when it concerns thequestion about the function of religion thesystem of religion itself or science as anexternal observerrdquo (Luhmann 2000 p 118)

20 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

The kind of phenomenology of globalizationthat I sketched above allows us to ask aboutthe kinds of challenges religion faces in anage of globalization For religion appears as aresource of images concepts traditions andpractices that can allow individuals andcommunities to deal with a world that ischanging around them by the hour (Robert-son and Garrett 1991 Luhmann 2000) Inthe new Unubersichtlichkeit [unsurveyabil-ity] of our global society religion appears ascompendium of intuitions that have not beenextinguished by the so-called process ofsecularization (Mendieta forthcoming a)Most importantly however religion cannotbe dismissed or derided because it is theprivileged if not the primary form in whichthe impoverished masses of the invisiblecities of the world (those cities to which Ipointed in the first part of this essay)articulate their hopes as well as critique theirworld

The first challenge to religion that ourphenomenology of globalization allow us toarticulate has to do with the lsquode-transcenden-talizing of othernessrsquo or what I also wouldlike to call the lsquoroutinization of othernessrsquoThere is a correlation between the wayhumanity has conceptualized otherness met-aphysically and conceptually on the onehand and humanityrsquos relationship to real andconcrete otherness as it has been experiencedexistentially and phenomenologically on theother hand This correlation has been medi-ated by humanityrsquos decreasing ruralism Inother words the less rural and thus the moreurban dwelling humans have become theless other is the otherness that we can thinkof or dream up The suggestion is that themetaphysics of alterity that has guided somuch of Western theology and religiousthinking over the last 2000 years has beendetermined by a particular asymmetrybetween the country and the city For thelongest history of humanity most societieshave been farming and rural-dwelling com-munities and associations Contact betweenextremely different communities and societ-ies was sporadic and rare and when contact

did occurred this was meditated by citydwellers and the long memory of popularmythologies But as was noted above in thedawning 21st century most humans will becity dwellers Furthermore In the 21st cen-tury most humanity will be conglomerated inthe mega-urbes of the Third World Underthis circumstance the holy other the abso-lutely other will be deflated Alterity and theextraordinary what can also be called thetremendum are de-mystified and de-met-aphysicalized (Habermas 1992 Placher1996) Either everyone will be a stranger orno one will be because we will all bestrangers in a city of strangers In such asituation otherness will have become a rou-tine an un-extra-ordinary event How thenare we to think divine alterity the othernessof the holy in a situation in which onto-logically and metaphysically all alterity hasbeen deflated demoted rendered normallevelled to the cotidian Are we in a situationof having to ldquorisk a new idea of holinessrdquo asBarry Taylor Pastor at the Sanctuary Churchin Santa Monica put it This would have tobe a holiness which is not other worldly buta holiness which is about the difference anduniqueness of others those who are oureveryday other with whom we ride thesubway with whom we walk the streets ofpopulated mega-urbes of the new age withwhom we share in anonymity the crowdedspaces of the new cities The real andmetaphorical wilderness of the world of itsjungles and forests of its undiscovered con-tinents and untamed seas of its unmappeddeserts and unnavigated rivers were excusesas well instigations to go searching for godbeyond the familial the urbane the too closeand already lsquodomesticatedrsquo God was beyondthe world other than the world Now thequestion is how do we discover the other inthe mundane difference of every fellowhuman being and the crowded city ofstrangers

The second challenge has to do with thecity as locus of the culture of consumptionas the site for an ethos of immediacyhedonism and hyper-excitation Sassen

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 21

speaks of the city as the crossroads of aconfrontation between the flows of capitaland the flows of peoples One of the waysthese flows clash in cities is through theconfrontation between cultures that isbetween different modalities of life Themore people become urban dwellers themore people are exposed to the cornucopiaof cultural possibilities It is not just thatmore people are in cities it is also that morepeople are seeking to participate in thestandards of life promised by urban dwellingThe challenges are unprecedented We arepresently choking in our own refuse in ourown garbage The psychological toil mustalso be unprecedented The level of unmetexpectations unfilled desires the gapbetween universally promised but exorbi-tantly expensive commodities that shatteredself-images and worth and that are availableto a relatively small fraction of the worldpopulation has grown exponentially Thereis another underside to the city as thecrossroads of the clash of modalities of lifeThe more cities grow the more they exerttheir pull on the so-called hinterland therural areas The more agriculture is mecha-nized and industrialized the more we adoptbiotechnology the more superfluous ldquofarm-ersrdquo become At the same time the expansionof telecommunications television and paidfor television and satellite connections havemade it easier to link up and peer into theldquotube of plentyrdquo to use that wonderfulphrase by Erik Barnouw (1990 [1975]) Thecity literally and metaphorically consumes itshinterland its outlying areas of supply itconsumes its resources and produce but alsoits cultures and its peoples

It is perhaps unnecessary to underscoreagain that most of the consumption of ruralresources is taking place in the metropolisesof the so-called First World So not onlymust we address the rampant and rapaciousconsumerism of cities in general but also theparticularly scandalous and grotesque asym-metry between the consumption of FirstWorld cities and Third World cities Thisissue becomes particularly pressing when in

the so-called advanced nations of the worldwe have thinkers intellectuals and criticstalking about a politics and culture of inclu-sion and tolerance (Habermas 1998) Thispolitics of inclusion is articulated with thebest intentions in mind The assumptionguiding it is that people throughout theworld would be better if they could partici-pate more equitably in the same kinds of so-called basic needs and luxuries that wewesterners enjoy But there is somethingprofoundly disingenuous and deleteriouslynaotildeve about such a view In some cases thepoverty of those across the world to whomwe would like to extend our standard ofliving is due precisely to our luxury Thatwhich we want to share is the cause of theprivation we want to alleviate Thus perhapsthe agenda should not be one of inclusionbut of dismantling the system that occa-sioned in the first place the exclusions webenefited and continue to benefit from

In this situation then the challengebecomes how to think of an urban culture offrugality The challenge is how to translatethe religious message and teaching of povertyas a holy way as a holy calling into a secularvalue a secular calling Another way ofputting it would be how do we translate thevisions of the desert fathers St Francis ofAssisi Mohandas Gandhi into an urbanvision for a spiritually starving youth Oralternatively if we think of what ArnoldToynbee and Eric Hobsbawn said about the20th century namely that its greatestachievement was the expansion of the middleclass then the goal for the 21st centuryshould be the expansion of a globalizedldquoliving level classrdquo In other words we haveto develop a culture for which the greatestachievement is not that everyone else will livelike us but that we will live at the level thatallows the most people to share in the mostfundamental goods potable water clean airinfant nutrition to sustain healthy standardsof unstunted growth and the possibility ofbasic education Here I would have to saythat I concur with Hardt and Negri on theircanonization of Assisi as a saint in the

22 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

hagiography of revolutionary militancy(2000 p 413)

The third challenge that our phenomenol-ogy of globalization allows us to elucidate hasto do with one of its central locus of analysisnamely the city If cities have become the siteswhere the unbundling of the state takes placethat is if we take cities to be the sites for thede-nationalizing of the national and if we atthe same time take the city as the locus of anemergent juridification or process of legal-ization of new forms of relationships then arewe not in need of having to re-think therelationship between the legal and politicalstructures of the emergent supra-nationalstate and the para- or extra-statist ldquochurchrdquoAnother way of putting it would be to notethat the church at least in the West antecedesthe modern nation-state In fact the churchwas the state and that partly because of thisthe quest for modernity the process ofmodernization entailed a secularization ofstate and legal structures In the process thechurchrsquos sphere of operation becamerestricted or constrained by the spaces drawnby the boundaries of nation-states Churchesand denominations became identified withnational boundaries which took place not-withstanding the underlying and fundamentaluniversalist thrust of Christianity If weaccept Sassenrsquos analysis which we must giventhe overwhelming evidence then we areinescapably put in the situation of having tore-think the relationship between the churchand the state In fact as the nation-states of the19th and 20th century are unbundled andnew forms of political and legal rights emergein de-territorialized and de-nationalizedforms of political self-determination then thechurch itself will have to face its de-national-ization and de-territorialization At the sametime however one of the fundamental condi-tions of the presence of the church in the 21stcentury will have to be that it must havelearned the lessons of the last 500 years ofcolonialism imperialism and post-colonial-ism This means that the challenge is dual Onthe one hand the new church must find aplace beyond the nation-states of political

modernity but on the other hand it must doso with a post-colonialist and post-imperialistattitude In the age of global transformationsthe new church cannot and will not be able toserve as an agent of globalization for the newimperial masters that began to profile them-selves in the horizon namely a united front ofEuropean nations (an expanded NATO) atechnological elite bent on re-designingnature and a cosmopolitan nobility withoutcontrols allegiances or consciences

Fourth and finally I think that anotherextremely important challenge has to do withthe insight that cities are the places wherecultures come to cultivate each other Inother words cities are the places where oldcultures are cannibalized but also carniv-alized where old cultures which are dyingcome to be renewed but also where newcultures are produced from the remains ofold ones (Hamacher 1997) Cities are germi-nals of new cultures Indeed just as we arevery likely to find micro-climates in mostglobal cities we are likely to find culturalenclaves little Italys Chinatowns Japan-towns little Bombays etc These places arewhere the centripetal and centrifugal forcesof homogenization and heterogenizationinteract to produce new cultural formationsUnderlying this new cultural genesis is itsevident and almost presentist character Theprocesses of cultural genesis take place rightin front of our eyes Cultures are notmillennial sedimentations and even thatwhich is peddled as the oldest is a present-day version of the old Most importantlycultures have become something we produceand choose cultures are something which weeither nurture and preserve or abandon anddisavow In all of these cases we are notpassive but active agents of transformationIn this situation the challenge for the newchurch for an urban ministry for the 21stcentury is how to develop an ecclesiology ofcultural diversity How will the new churchparticipate in this cultural genesis that isgerminating in global cities while retaining asense of identity Or conversely how will itretain a sense of cultural identity without

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 23

becoming either ethnocentric or jingoisticabout its cultural bequest without contribut-ing to the ossification of its own culture Onwhat terms can the new church participate inthe creation of new cultures and the preser-vation of successful ones

Conclusion

Cities are the vortex of the convergence ofthe processes of globalization and local-ization Cities are epitomes of glocalizationto use Robertsonrsquos language (1994) They arealso sites of the sedimentation of history Inthis essay I have sough to advance theresearch agenda that would take the ldquoinvisi-ble citiesrdquo of the so-called Third World astheir primary object of analysis At the sametime however I have urged that we look atthe cities in the developed industrializedworld through the eyes of their invisibleinhabitants and citizens immigrants ethnicminorities disenfranchised groups workerswomen and the youth There are invisiblecities within the cities that are so visible inmost urban theory and analysis as well asinvisible cities that remain unseen becausethey are not on the horizon of the academicagendas of researchers in the universities ofthe developed world

In tandem I have suspended judgementon whether to be for or against global-ization not because I do not think that wecan make moral judgments in this case butbecause I think we need to broaden ouranalyses of this new order of things Ideveloped some general points of departurefor a phenomenological analysis of global-ization This particular approach I thinkexhibits how ldquoglobalizationrdquo can and oughtto become a matter for serious philosophicalreflection I have identified the issues ofalterity temporality tradition the distinc-tion between the natural and the syntheticas philosophemes that are substantivelyimpacted by the processes of globalizationYet the phenomenological approach Iarticulate is deliberate in assuming a partic-

ular perspective or angle of approach I havesought to delineate a phenomenology ofglobalization from below The world doesnot disclose itself in the same way to allsubjects much less globalization Thus thephenomenology here presented urges us tolook at the world from below from theperspective of those who seem to be moreadversely than beneficially affected by theprocesses that make up globalization

This is what the ldquobelowrdquo in the subtitle ofthe essay pointed to the below of the poorand destitute the below of those who are notseen and do not register in the radar of socialtheory Furthermore I have tried to furtherqualify that perspective from below byfocusing my attention on the issue of reli-gion Religion clearly can mean manythings but at the very least it means ldquothe sighof the oppressedrdquo and the ldquoencyclopediccompendiumrdquo of a heartless world as Marxput it (1994 p 28) if only because it is theform in which the destitute the most vulner-able in our world express their critiques aswell as hopes I have argued that we ought tolook at cities as germinals of new culturesand that if we want to trace the emergentcultures of those ldquobelowrdquo then we betterlook at religious movements In what waysare the religious language of the oppressedand disenfranchised of the invisible cities ofglobalization critiques and resistances toglobalization This is clearly a researchdesideratum rather than a description oreven assessment

Note

1 I want to thank Bob Catterall for encouraging me towrite this article and for his comments on earlyversions of it I also want to thank Lois AnnLorentzen and Nelson Maldonado Torres who readit with great care and made substantive suggestionscorrections and criticisms that have made meunderstand better my own project I also want tothank Enrique Dussel Jurgen Habermas WalterMignolo and Santiago Castro-Gomez with whom Ihave discussed many of the ideas here developedand who have given me impetus to continue alongthis line with their own pioneering works

24 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Bibliography

Adorno TW (1984) lsquoThe idea of natural historyrsquo Telos60 pp 31ndash42

Amin S (1996) Capitalism in the Age of GlobalizationThe Management of Contemporary Society Londonand New York Zed Books

Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large CulturalDimensions of Globalization MinneapolisUniversity of Minnesota Press

Appiah KA (1992) In My Fatherrsquos House Africa in thePhilosophy of Culture New York Oxford UniversityPress

Aronowitz S (2000) The Knowledge FactoryDismantling the Corporate University and CreatingTrue Higher Learning Boston Beacon Press

Barber BR (1995) Jihad vs McWorld How Globalismand Tribalism are Reshaping the World New YorkBallantine Books

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1993) lsquoA globalizingeconomy some implications and consequencesrsquo inB Mazlish and R Buultjens (eds) ConceptualizingGlobal History pp 153ndash172 Boulder COWestview Press

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1994) Global DreamsImperial Corporations and the New World OrderNew York Simon amp Schuster

Barnouw E (1990 [1975]) Tube of Plenty TheEvolution of American Television New YorkOxford University Press

Baudrillard J (1981) For a Critique of the PoliticalEconomy of the Sign St Louis MO Telos Press

Bauman Z (1998a) Globalization The HumanConsequences New York Columbia UniversityPress

Bauman Z (1998b) lsquoPostmodern religionrsquo in P Heelas(ed) Religion Modernity and PostmodernityCambridge Blackwell

Beck U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung Frankfurt amMain Suhrkamp

Bell D (1976) The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism New York Basic Books

Benford G (1999) Deep Time How HumanityCommunicates Across Millenia New York AvonBooks Inc

Beyer P (1994) Religion and Globalization LondonSage

Brahm Jr G and Driscoll M (eds) (1995) ProstheticTerritories Politics and Hypertechnologies BoulderCO Westview

Bretherton C and Ponton G (eds) (1996) GlobalPolitics An Introduction Cambridge Blackwell

Calvino I (1974) Invisible Cities New York HarcourtBrace Jovanovich

Casanova J (1994) Public Religions in the ModernWorld Chicago University of Chicago Press

Castells M (1996ndash8) The Information Age EconomySociety and Culture Vol 1 The Rise of the

Network Society Vol 2 The Power of Identity Vol3 End of Millenium Malden MA and OxfordBlackwell Publishers

Chaunu P (1974) Historie science sociale la dureelrsquoespace et lrsquohomme a lrsquoepoque moderne ParisSociete drsquoedition drsquoenseignement superieur

Clark RP (1997) The Global Imperative AnInterpretative History of the Spread of HumankindBoulder CO Westview Press

Costello P (1993) World Historians and Their GoalsTwentieth-century Answers to Modernism DeKalbNorthern Illinois University Press

Dawkins K (1997) Gene Wars The Politics ofBiotechnology New York Seven Stories Press

de Benoist A (1996) lsquoConfronting globalizationrsquo Telos108 pp 117ndash137

Dussel E (1998) Etica de la Liberacion en la edad deglobalizacion y de la exclusion Madrid EditorialTrotta

Elias N (1992) Time An Essay Cambridge MA BasilBlackwell

Featherstone M (1995) Undoing CultureGlobalization Postmodernism and Identity LondonSage Publications

Fritsche J (1999) Historical Destiny and NationalSocialism in Heideggerrsquos Being and Time Berkeleyand Los Angeles University of California Press

Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of SocietyCambridge Polity Press

Giddens A (1987) Social Theory and ModernSociology Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of ModernityCambridge Polity Press

Gray J (1998) False Dawn The Delusions of GlobalCapitalism London Granta Books

Grossberg L (1999) lsquoSpeculations and articulations ofglobalizationrsquo Polygraph 11 pp 11ndash48

Habermas J (1992) Postmetaphysical ThinkingPhilosophical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (1998) The Inclusion of the Other Studiesin Political Theory Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (2001) The Postnational ConstellationPolitical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Hall Sir Peter (1998) Cities in Civilization New YorkPantheon Books

Hamacher W (1997) lsquoOne 2 many multiculturalismsrsquoin H de Vries and S Weber (eds) ViolenceIdentity and Self-determination Stanford CAStanford University Press

Haraway D (1991) Simians Cyborgs and WomenThe Reinvention of Nature New York Routledge

Hardt M and Negri A (2000) Empire CambridgeMA Harvard University Press

Harvey D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity AnEnquiry into the Origins of Cultural ChangeCambridge MA Basil Blackwell

Hayles NK (1999) How we Became PosthumanVirtual Bodies in Cybernetics Literature and

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 13

Many have been the horrors that havevisited cultures through their encounterwith the nation-state but one of the clearbenefits of this encounter has been thedevelopment of mass literacy and the estab-lishment of education institutions that are ifnot de facto at least nominally open to allcitizens of the state Talcott Parsons calledthis achievement of the nation-state theeducational revolution Amartya Sen forinstance has urged us to measure absolutepoverty in terms of the years of schoolingalong with access to potable water qualityof air and access to minimally nutritiousfood (Sen 1999) But this is only the leastnoticeable although perhaps the mostimportant aspect of the information revolu-tion of the 20th century The most notice-able is of course the computer and tele-communications revolutions Jeremy Rifkinhas appropriately suggested that we talk interms of the ldquobio-tech centuryrdquo and that weunderstand that the genetic computer andtelecommunications revolutions are differ-ent flanks of one same front the informa-tion revolution (Rifkin 1998) DNA wasdiscovered by Watson and Crick in 1953 in1990 the USA launched the Genome proj-ect by the turn of the third millennium theentire human genome plus the genetic makeup of the most important foods will becontrolled by a few multinationals (Daw-kins 1997) In the USA already over 25of the grain produced is genetically engi-neered Presently one of the most impor-tant conflicts between the USA and Europesince the deployment of missiles throughoutWestern Europe during the 1960s and 1980sis brewing over the import of geneticallyaltered produce and meats You might wantto call this bio-tech imperialism but youmay also call it the carrying out to itslogical conclusion of the ldquoagricultural revo-lutionrdquo (Shiva 1991 1997 1999) Similarlythe computer was invented during the1940s but only began to be mass producedin the 1970s Today any laptop has morecomputational power than all of the com-puters of the first generation put together

Micro-chips are superseded every 18months with each new cycle increasingexponentially the speed memory and con-centration of micro-processors In 1957 theRussians launched Sputnik the first artificialsatellite the Americans followed in 1962with the launching of Telstar 1 the firsttelevision satellite Today there are morethan 200 satellites forming a canopy ofelectric nodes linking the world in a net ofsynchronous telecommunications It is pro-jected that by the first decade of the nextmillennium there will be more than 300satellites (National Geographic 1999)

One of the fundamental characteristics ofthe modern world is that the extraction ofraw materials and their transformation intocommodities has been demoted from itsplace of privilige in bourgeois capitalism bythe production of scientific knowledge andits dissemination as information This is whatthe information revolution amounts tonamely the superseding of the industrialrevolution by the transformation both in themeans and object of production (Baudrillard1981 Lash and Urry 1994 Lowe 1995)Today what matters is not the raw materialand the possession of the means of produc-tion instead what matters is the knowledgethat allows one to discover even invent rawmaterials which are processed through ever-changing means of production The clearestexample of this is the bio-tech industrywhere Monsanto is the perfect illustration ofthe supervening of raw materials and meansof production by the production of knowl-edge that controls seeds and how they areprocessed (Lappe and Bailey 1998 Rifkin1998)

Second the acceleration of the productionand information dissemination has had adirect and evident impact on the way wethink about history and tradition The dura-bility and unifying role of our world-viewsor images of the world is a function of therelationship between our individual bodilyexperience of space and time and the way theworld surrounding us itself undergoeschange The world around us in turn is

14 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

made up of the social world and the naturalworld Each one has its own rhythms andtime (Kubler 1962 Elias 1992 Heidegger1992 Benford 1999) In light of this weshould speak of a biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time (Wal-lerstein 1991) Biomorphic space-time is theway space and time are experienced by theindividual The clock that measures thisspace-time might be said to be the biologicalclock of each human being Social space-timeis what social groups societies communitieslive and experience This space-time is meas-ured in generations historical processesevents the rise and fall of cities The motor ofthis space-time is the level of socio-technicaldevelopment of a society its infra-structuresand super-structures World space-time is thepace at which the natural world evolves andtransforms seasons come and go rivers runand dry up mountains erode plains dry upand become deserts and forests are cut downand grow up or turn into shrubbery andwasteland The further back we look in thehistory of humanity the more disjointed andseparate were the rhythms at which thesedifferent clocks ran and operated

Today there is a convergence of the speedsof these different space-times If we comparethe speed of world space-time and bio-morphic space-time we find that they arerunning almost simultaneously In otherwords the more our own life-spans arelengthened and world space-time the timeor speed at which the world itself changesshrinks the more unstable and local are ourworld-views or images of the world Cosmo-logical views as well as abstract universalitywere able to be sustained as long as the worlddid not seem not to change and humans hadsuch short life-spans that any substantivechange in the world was not noticeable andexperienceable by any two or three genera-tions Pierre Chaunu (1974) remarked thatone of the fundamental elements in thepossibility for the communication of knowl-edge was the lengthening of the life-spans ofhumans during and after the 16th centuryToday we have the convergence of unprece-

dented human life-spans (to the extent thatsome societies are registering the divergentvectors of the general ageing of their popula-tions and the lowering of infant mortalitywhere both are clearly a function of theimprovement in general medicine and itshaving been made more broadly available)with unprecedentedly accelerated worldchanges The latter is not simply a meremirage occasioned by almost synchronousworld communication It is the case that weare changing the face of the planet in waysthat not just generations but individuals areable to note and distinctly remember In thisway we can talk about the malleability oftradition and the arbitrariness of history Inother words what Harvey and Giddenscalled respectively the compression and col-lapse of space-time manifests itself in thecontemporary plurification of historicalmethodologies and re-narrativation of histo-ries as well as the skepticism that anyhistorical chronology is not a function ofsome ideological agenda Historical revisionhas become the daily bread of the historicallycynical masses of peoples who cannot read inhistory the telos of either emancipation orrationality In the age of globalization reasondoes not entail freedom nor revolution free-dom nor reason revolution In this way wecan say with Heelas Lash and Morris that welive in an post-traditional or de-tradition-alized world in which these notations thatgave cohesion and direction to the project ofmodernity have been superseded or ren-dered ideological and historicized (Heelas etal 1996)

Third any phenomenology of globaliza-tion must also begin with what I take to be anequally momentous transformation ofhuman societies and this has to do with themega-urbanization of the world We can saythat for most of its history most of humanityhas been rural Cities developed as append-ages to large agricultural areas Cities werefunctional principles of rural areas Even-tually this relationship reversed but onlyafter the city ceased to be a communicationnode for agricultural exchange Cities started

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 15

to acquire their independence when theycould produce their own commoditiesnamely knowledge and political power Thisonly began to happen after the Renaissancewhen major cities were not just ports but alsocentres of learning culture and politicalpower (Hall 1998) This trend howeveronly takes off when industrialization allowscities to become their own productive cen-tres even if they still remain tied to ruralcentres The reversal of the relationshipbetween rural and urban areas howeverbegan to shift in the 1950s during these yearsalready 30 of all humanity lived in citiesThe United Nations projects that by the year2005 50 of humanity will live in citiesHere we must pause and reflect that thismeans that a substantive part of humanitywill still remain rural and that most of thoselsquofarmersrsquo and lsquopeasantsrsquo will be in so-calledThird World countries Nonetheless as EricHobsbawn remarked in his work The Age ofExtremes the ldquomost dramatic and far-reach-ing social change of the second half of the[the twentieth century] is the death of thepeasantryrdquo (Hobsbawn 1994 p 289) Theother side of this reversal of the relationshipbetween city and country is that most mega-cities will be in what is called the ThirdWorld By the third millennium the 10 mostpopulated metropolises of the World will beneither in Europe nor in the USA

These trends can be attributed to a varietyof factors The most important factor in theelimination of the rural is the industrializa-tion of agriculture a process that reached itszenith with the so-called ldquogreen revolutionrdquoof the 1950s and 1960s Under the industrial-ization of agriculture we must understandnot just the introduction of better tools butthe homogenization of agricultural produc-tion by which I mean the introduction on aglobal scale of the mono-cultivo (Shiva1993) We must also include here the elimina-tion of self-subsistent forms of farmingthrough the elimination of self-renewing bio-diverse eco-systems One of the most effec-tive ways however in which the city hasimposed itself over the countryside is

through the projection of images that desta-bilized the sense of tradition and culturalcontinuity so fundamental to the rhythms ofthe countryside Through television radioand now the internet the city assaults thefabric of the countryside Tradition is under-mined by the promises and riches projectedby the tube of plenty the cornucopia of otherpossibilities the television and its world ofinfo-tainment (see Baumanrsquos wonderful dis-cussion of how under the globalization ofentertainment the Benthamian Panopticonturns into the MacWorldInfotainment Syn-opticon (1998a pp 53ndash54))

Indeed one of the most characteristicaspects of globalization is what is called thedecreasing importance of the local the statethe national We therefore need to speakwith Jurgen Habermas and Paul Kennedy ofa post-national constellation in which sover-eign nation-states as territorially localizedhave become less important less in controlof their own spatiality (Kennedy 1993Habermas 2001) But what is forgotten isthat there is a simultaneous process oflocalization in which place acquires a newsignificance certain spaces of course (Feath-erstone 1995) The city is the site at whichthe forces of the local and the global meetthe site where the forces of transnationalfinance capital and the local labour marketsand national infra-structures enter into con-flict and contestation over the city AsSaskia Sassen writes

ldquoThe city has indeed emerged as a site fornew claims by global capital which uses thecity as an lsquoorganizational commodityrsquo butalso by disadvantage sectors of the urbanpopulation which in large cities arefrequently as internationalized a presence asis capital The denationalizing of urbanspace and the formation of new claims bytransnational actors and involvingcontestation raise the questionmdashwhose cityis itrdquo (Sassen 1998 p xx)

The city in fact has become the crossroadfor new denationalizing politics in whichglobal actors capitals and moving peoples

16 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

enter into conflict across a transnationalurban system

Habermas has noted with acuity that oneof the characteristics of the 18th and 19thcenturies was their pronounced fears of theldquomassrdquo ldquothe crowdrdquo (Habermas 2001 p39) Such fears were summarized in the titleof the prescient work by Ortega y GassetThe Revolt of the Masses (1985) As wasnoted already the 18th and the 19th centuriessignalled the reversal of the relationshipbetween countryside and city This reversalmeant the rapid urbanization and demo-graphic explosion in cities which accompanythe rapid industrialization of certain metro-polises of the West London Berlin NewYork Chicago Newark Mexico City PortoAlegre and the non-West New DehliTokyo Beijing Cairo etc Urbanization andIndustrialization gave rise to the spectre ofthe irascible insatiable uncontrollable massthat would raze everything in its path Threeclassical responses emerged Sorel and thecelebration of the creative power of anar-chical and explosive unorganized mass mobi-lization the Marxist-Leninist and theattempt to domesticate and train the creativeand transformative power of social unrestthrough the development of a party machin-ery that would guide the ire and discontentof gathered masses of unemployed andemployed workers and the conservative andreactionary response of an Edmund Burkebut which is also echoed in the works ofphilosophers like Heidegger which dis-dained and vilified the common folk themass in a simple term Das Man The crowdthe mass is consumed and distracted byprattle and curiosity as it wallows in themiasma of inauthenticity and cowardness(Fritsche 1999)

Today such attitudes seem not just foreignbut also unrealistic Most of our experience isdetermined by a continuous mingling withcrowds and large undifferentiated masses ofpeople We get on the road and we areconfronted with traffic jams we get on thesubway and people accost and touch us fromall directions We live in continuous friction

with the stranger the other May we suggestthat the ldquoOtherrdquo has become such an impor-tant point of departure for philosophicalreflection precisely because we exist in such acontinuous propinquity with it Indeed theOther is no longer simply a phantasmagor-ical presence projected and barely discern-ible beyond the boundaries of the ecumenethe polis and the frontiers of the nation-stateAt the same time the discourse about theldquootherrdquo what is called the politics of alteritymarks a shift from the negative discourse ofanxiety and fear epitomized in the termldquoanomierdquo so well diagnosed by DurkheimSimmel and Freud and so aptly described byChristopher Lasch (1979) to the positivediscourse of solidarity inclusion acceptancetolerance citizenship and justice so welldiagnosed and described by Zymunt Bauman(1998b) Ulrich Beck (1997) Anthony Gid-dens (1990) and Jurgen Habermas (2001)

Are there any morals to be extracted fromthis profound transformation in the wayhumanity in general understands itself Forthe longest period of the history of human-kind groups remained both sheltered fromand inured to otherness by the solidity andstability of their traditions and their worldsCultures remained fairly segregated maps ofthe world in which the foreign strange andunknown was relegated beyond the bound-aries of the controllable and surveyable Tothis extent lsquoothernessrsquo was legislated over byreligion the state nature and even historynamely those centres of gravity of cultureand images of the world In an age in whichall traditions are under constant revision andhuman temporality converges with the age ofthe world itself then lsquoothernessrsquo appearsbefore us as naked unmediated otherness weare all others before each other In otherwords neither our sense of identity nor thesense of difference of the other are given apriori they are always discovered consti-tuted and dismantled in the very processes ofencounter The other was always constitutedfor us by extrinsic forces Now the other isconstituted in the very process of our iden-tity formation but in a contingent fashion

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 17

We make others as we make ourselves Thisreflection links up with some insights thatEnrique Dussel has had with respect to therelationship between the emergence of citiesand the development of the first codes ofethics the Hammurabi Code and the BookN of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Dussel1998) Such codes arose precisely becauseindividuals were thrown into the proximityof each other and were thus confronted witheach otherrsquos vulnerability and injurabilityThe injuction to take care of the poor theindigent the orphan the widow the invalidcould only arise out of the urban experienceof the contiguity with the injurable flesh ofthe stranger Today the experience of theindigent other is of the immigrant the exiledthe refugee who build their enclaves in theshadows of the glamorous city of transna-tional capital (King 1990 Sassen 1999) Forthis reason the other and the immigrant areinterchangeable but this also raises the issueof the new global city as a space for therepresentation and formation of post-colo-nial identities Geo-cities are spaces for thereconfiguration of image the imaginationand the imaginary as Arjun Appaduraiargued (1996) In this sense the centrality ofthe urban experience for humanity meansthat otherness is not going to be a meremetaphysical or even phenomenological cat-egory and concern Under the reign of thecity Otherness has become quotidian andpractical

Fourth another fundamental point ofdeparture for a phenomenology of global-ization will have to be the analysis of theplace of technology in our everyday lives Iwould like to understand technology in twosenses First in its broadest sense as ldquothe useof scientific knowledge to specify ways ofdoing things in a reproducible wayrdquo (Bell1976 p 29) Second as a prosthesis of thehuman body Technology to paraphrase awonderful aphorism of William Burroughsis the mind wanting more body I will discussfirst the former sense of technology as ascientific specification for the iterable way ofdoing things In this sense then a hospital is

a social technology like agriculture and cattleraising are material technologies By the sametoken prisons asylums and ghettos are socialtechnologies There is however somethingunique about technology in the 20th centuryand that is that technology itself has becomean object of technology in other words theuse of science in order to produce ever moreefficient ways of doing things in ever morereproducible ways itself has become a tech-nological quest This technology of technol-ogy is what one might call the institutional-ization of invention Alfred NorthWhitehead noted that ldquothe greatest inventionof the 19th century was the invention of themethod of inventionrdquo (Whitehead 1925 p141) What Whitehead attributes to the 19thcentury reached its true apogee in the secondhalf of the 20th century with the institu-tionalization of the research universityWhile the programme of the research uni-versity goes back to the German ideal of theuniversity it is in the USA that this ideagained its highest formalization and statesupport Without question we have to attrib-ute the greatest technological breakthroughsof the 20th century to this unique con-vergence of the state the military and theresearch university what Eisenhower calledthe militaryndashindustrial complex and whatwe now with hindsight should more appro-priately call the militaryndashuniversityndashindus-trial complex (Kenney 1986 Aronowitz2000)

The rise of the nation-state also signifiedthe rise of state-sponsored education and thestate university The university plays a dualrole On the one hand it has the function ofpreparing citizens and workers for the mate-rial and cultural-political self-reproductionof society On the other it has the role ofinstitutionalizing scientific investigation theinvention of invention Through the uni-versity the state invests in its future ability totransform its material technologies of self-reproduction Winning Nobel prizes is notjust a matter of pride it is above all aquestion of institutional power to supportimmense research budgets whose actual

18 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

industrial and technical application might befar off into the future This is one of thereasons why the USA has remained a worldpower despite its apparent military stale-mate namely because it still remains thecentre for the production of most techno-logical innovation

Related to the invention of invention whatI called the institutionalization of the tech-nology of technology as its other side is theinterpenetration of technology in everyaspect of our lives Even those who are notdirectly affected by technological revolutionsin their daily life are nonetheless indirectlyaffected insofar as their worlds economiesand cultures are made vulnerable to take-overs and colonization by those who drivethe technological revolutions of today Forthe longest period of the history of humanitytechnology remained distant from the livesand bodies of men and women not because itdid not impact them but because it did sosporadically and in such tangential ways firethe wheel the printing press the metalplough the steam engine the automobileEach technological innovation however hasmeant a further interpenetration betweentool and human body With this I turn to thediscussion of technology as prosthesis thesecond sense of technology I want to con-sider in light of a phenomenology ofglobalization

A technology is a way of doing things inways that can be reproduced again andagain and that therefore can be taught andpassed on Culture is in this sense the mostcomplex and important technology of all Inthis sense a technology is a way for asociety to extend itself across time fromgeneration to generation century to century(Giddens 1984 1987) A technology gen-erally instantiated itself in tools Tools allowparticular individuals to reach beyond theboundaries of their own bodies A tool is anextension of a particular bodily organ thataugments its original performance Tool andbody however have remained relatively dis-tinct even if one can claim that the hand isa product of our invention of tools

(Rothenberg 1993) Recognition of the dis-tinctness between tool and body does notentail the negation of their dialectical inter-dependence and co-modification Their dis-tinctness was sustained by what I havealready referred to above as the temporalityof humans and the time of the world Whenthe time of humans and the world convergewhat mediates their encounter tools hasalready fused with the body or has alreadymade the world immediate Our experienceof the world is already so mediated by ourtechnological tools that we cannot distin-guish the world from the tool and thesefrom the body We are our tools We are ourtechnological prosthesis because they arethe world (Brahm and Driscoll 1995) Butthis does not mean that technology is itselftransparent Rather technology itself hasbecome like our bodies in the sense that wedo not know how our livers hearts orbrains work we just assume that they willdo what they were designed to do and ifthey break down then we go to aspecialist

Everywhere we are surrounded by techno-logical devices which have insinuated them-selves in our lives and without which wecannot do the watch the telephone the carthe television but also toothpaste X-raysvaccines birth control pills condoms sunscreen eye-glasses shavers purified andchlorinated water and so on

What I am talking about can be illustratedby comparing Mary Shelleyrsquos Frankensteinin which a creation out of human partsbecomes monstrous precisely because itentails the complete instrumentalization ofour bodies and thus a sacrilage of its allegeddivine naturalness and Donna Harawayrsquosborgs which demonstrate and theorize towhat extent we are always already synthetic(Haraway 1991) There is no nature outsidethe confines of the laboratory Resistance isfutile to the logic of technology because weare all already borg we are products of ourtechnologies and nature exists only as anArcadian fantasy This reading should not betaken to be suggesting that nature does not

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 19

exist in the sense that it is a fiction the mirageof radical social constructivism Rather thepoint is to highlight the ways in which natureis to be thought of in terms of what today wecall the lsquorecursive loopsrsquo between technologyand nature in which nature is already anlsquoartefactrsquo and lsquomachinesrsquo are natural (Hayles1999) Indeed appropriating Marxrsquos languagefrom his 1844 manuscripts we have to talkabout the humanization of machines and themechanization of humanity

Is there a moral to be extracted by theinterpenetration of humans and their techno-logical prosthesis to the point that youcannot distinguish them any longer I wouldsay that a Heideggerian response to thisquestion is anachronistic and indefensibleOn the other hand a dia-mat in the sense ofEngelsrsquos dialectical materialism will not doeither Science is neither metaphysically badnor a malleable ideological epiphenomenonAgainst these two positions I would advo-cate what has been called Kranzbergrsquos lawwhich reads ldquotechnology is neither good norbad nor is it neutralrdquo (Castells 1996 Vol 1p 65)

I would like to summarize my reflectionsby suggesting that once a phenomenology ofglobalization takes seriously the points ofdeparture discussed above we will discoverthat globalization might stand for anotheraxial period This new axial age will becharacterized by at least these four themesfirst the perpetual revolutionizing of pro-duction technologies has turned into thetechnology of innovation in such a way thatthe generation of capital is relocated to theproduction of new information technologiesand not production and processing of rawmaterials Second because of the almostinstantaneous information transmission andreception across the world and the con-vergence of natural historical and personaltemporalities we have the effect of the de-transcendentalization and temporalization oftradition These de-transcendentalizationsand temporalizations suggest that our imagesof the world will be at the reach of our owndesign In this sense we will be able to speak

of the true secularization of the world and itscomplete humanization Third is the routini-zation and de-metaphysicalization of other-ness brought about by the hyper-urbaniza-tion of humanity Otherness will become aproduct of society and in this sense we willhave to talk of regimes of alterization Thelsquootherrsquo then will become a continuouspresence that will require our constant con-cern and vigilance Fourth is the dissolutionof the boundary between natural and syn-thetic body and tool technology and natureWe will have to speak then of the age inwhich humans have become their own crea-tions and in which the directions of thereproduction of both mind and body cultureand technology will become a concern ofpolitical practice of paramount importance

The image of the world projected byglobalization is one which collapses thedifferences between biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time whatwe see is what we get To put it in thelanguage of an essay by Theodor Adorno thehistory of nature is no different from thehistory of humanity (Adorno 1984) Global-ization also projects an image of the world inwhich otherness is not external and intract-able but produced from within Finallyglobalization is an image of the world inwhich the natural and the social the createdand uncreated have been brought togetherunder the insight that we have been produc-ing ourselves as we have been producingtools to alter the world Now however theproducing of our tools is not different fromthe production of ourselves and our worldIn the image of the world projected byglobalization the world is humanity lookingat itself through its eyes and not the eyes ofa god history or nature

III City of angels

ldquoWho is the observer when it concerns thequestion about the function of religion thesystem of religion itself or science as anexternal observerrdquo (Luhmann 2000 p 118)

20 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

The kind of phenomenology of globalizationthat I sketched above allows us to ask aboutthe kinds of challenges religion faces in anage of globalization For religion appears as aresource of images concepts traditions andpractices that can allow individuals andcommunities to deal with a world that ischanging around them by the hour (Robert-son and Garrett 1991 Luhmann 2000) Inthe new Unubersichtlichkeit [unsurveyabil-ity] of our global society religion appears ascompendium of intuitions that have not beenextinguished by the so-called process ofsecularization (Mendieta forthcoming a)Most importantly however religion cannotbe dismissed or derided because it is theprivileged if not the primary form in whichthe impoverished masses of the invisiblecities of the world (those cities to which Ipointed in the first part of this essay)articulate their hopes as well as critique theirworld

The first challenge to religion that ourphenomenology of globalization allow us toarticulate has to do with the lsquode-transcenden-talizing of othernessrsquo or what I also wouldlike to call the lsquoroutinization of othernessrsquoThere is a correlation between the wayhumanity has conceptualized otherness met-aphysically and conceptually on the onehand and humanityrsquos relationship to real andconcrete otherness as it has been experiencedexistentially and phenomenologically on theother hand This correlation has been medi-ated by humanityrsquos decreasing ruralism Inother words the less rural and thus the moreurban dwelling humans have become theless other is the otherness that we can thinkof or dream up The suggestion is that themetaphysics of alterity that has guided somuch of Western theology and religiousthinking over the last 2000 years has beendetermined by a particular asymmetrybetween the country and the city For thelongest history of humanity most societieshave been farming and rural-dwelling com-munities and associations Contact betweenextremely different communities and societ-ies was sporadic and rare and when contact

did occurred this was meditated by citydwellers and the long memory of popularmythologies But as was noted above in thedawning 21st century most humans will becity dwellers Furthermore In the 21st cen-tury most humanity will be conglomerated inthe mega-urbes of the Third World Underthis circumstance the holy other the abso-lutely other will be deflated Alterity and theextraordinary what can also be called thetremendum are de-mystified and de-met-aphysicalized (Habermas 1992 Placher1996) Either everyone will be a stranger orno one will be because we will all bestrangers in a city of strangers In such asituation otherness will have become a rou-tine an un-extra-ordinary event How thenare we to think divine alterity the othernessof the holy in a situation in which onto-logically and metaphysically all alterity hasbeen deflated demoted rendered normallevelled to the cotidian Are we in a situationof having to ldquorisk a new idea of holinessrdquo asBarry Taylor Pastor at the Sanctuary Churchin Santa Monica put it This would have tobe a holiness which is not other worldly buta holiness which is about the difference anduniqueness of others those who are oureveryday other with whom we ride thesubway with whom we walk the streets ofpopulated mega-urbes of the new age withwhom we share in anonymity the crowdedspaces of the new cities The real andmetaphorical wilderness of the world of itsjungles and forests of its undiscovered con-tinents and untamed seas of its unmappeddeserts and unnavigated rivers were excusesas well instigations to go searching for godbeyond the familial the urbane the too closeand already lsquodomesticatedrsquo God was beyondthe world other than the world Now thequestion is how do we discover the other inthe mundane difference of every fellowhuman being and the crowded city ofstrangers

The second challenge has to do with thecity as locus of the culture of consumptionas the site for an ethos of immediacyhedonism and hyper-excitation Sassen

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 21

speaks of the city as the crossroads of aconfrontation between the flows of capitaland the flows of peoples One of the waysthese flows clash in cities is through theconfrontation between cultures that isbetween different modalities of life Themore people become urban dwellers themore people are exposed to the cornucopiaof cultural possibilities It is not just thatmore people are in cities it is also that morepeople are seeking to participate in thestandards of life promised by urban dwellingThe challenges are unprecedented We arepresently choking in our own refuse in ourown garbage The psychological toil mustalso be unprecedented The level of unmetexpectations unfilled desires the gapbetween universally promised but exorbi-tantly expensive commodities that shatteredself-images and worth and that are availableto a relatively small fraction of the worldpopulation has grown exponentially Thereis another underside to the city as thecrossroads of the clash of modalities of lifeThe more cities grow the more they exerttheir pull on the so-called hinterland therural areas The more agriculture is mecha-nized and industrialized the more we adoptbiotechnology the more superfluous ldquofarm-ersrdquo become At the same time the expansionof telecommunications television and paidfor television and satellite connections havemade it easier to link up and peer into theldquotube of plentyrdquo to use that wonderfulphrase by Erik Barnouw (1990 [1975]) Thecity literally and metaphorically consumes itshinterland its outlying areas of supply itconsumes its resources and produce but alsoits cultures and its peoples

It is perhaps unnecessary to underscoreagain that most of the consumption of ruralresources is taking place in the metropolisesof the so-called First World So not onlymust we address the rampant and rapaciousconsumerism of cities in general but also theparticularly scandalous and grotesque asym-metry between the consumption of FirstWorld cities and Third World cities Thisissue becomes particularly pressing when in

the so-called advanced nations of the worldwe have thinkers intellectuals and criticstalking about a politics and culture of inclu-sion and tolerance (Habermas 1998) Thispolitics of inclusion is articulated with thebest intentions in mind The assumptionguiding it is that people throughout theworld would be better if they could partici-pate more equitably in the same kinds of so-called basic needs and luxuries that wewesterners enjoy But there is somethingprofoundly disingenuous and deleteriouslynaotildeve about such a view In some cases thepoverty of those across the world to whomwe would like to extend our standard ofliving is due precisely to our luxury Thatwhich we want to share is the cause of theprivation we want to alleviate Thus perhapsthe agenda should not be one of inclusionbut of dismantling the system that occa-sioned in the first place the exclusions webenefited and continue to benefit from

In this situation then the challengebecomes how to think of an urban culture offrugality The challenge is how to translatethe religious message and teaching of povertyas a holy way as a holy calling into a secularvalue a secular calling Another way ofputting it would be how do we translate thevisions of the desert fathers St Francis ofAssisi Mohandas Gandhi into an urbanvision for a spiritually starving youth Oralternatively if we think of what ArnoldToynbee and Eric Hobsbawn said about the20th century namely that its greatestachievement was the expansion of the middleclass then the goal for the 21st centuryshould be the expansion of a globalizedldquoliving level classrdquo In other words we haveto develop a culture for which the greatestachievement is not that everyone else will livelike us but that we will live at the level thatallows the most people to share in the mostfundamental goods potable water clean airinfant nutrition to sustain healthy standardsof unstunted growth and the possibility ofbasic education Here I would have to saythat I concur with Hardt and Negri on theircanonization of Assisi as a saint in the

22 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

hagiography of revolutionary militancy(2000 p 413)

The third challenge that our phenomenol-ogy of globalization allows us to elucidate hasto do with one of its central locus of analysisnamely the city If cities have become the siteswhere the unbundling of the state takes placethat is if we take cities to be the sites for thede-nationalizing of the national and if we atthe same time take the city as the locus of anemergent juridification or process of legal-ization of new forms of relationships then arewe not in need of having to re-think therelationship between the legal and politicalstructures of the emergent supra-nationalstate and the para- or extra-statist ldquochurchrdquoAnother way of putting it would be to notethat the church at least in the West antecedesthe modern nation-state In fact the churchwas the state and that partly because of thisthe quest for modernity the process ofmodernization entailed a secularization ofstate and legal structures In the process thechurchrsquos sphere of operation becamerestricted or constrained by the spaces drawnby the boundaries of nation-states Churchesand denominations became identified withnational boundaries which took place not-withstanding the underlying and fundamentaluniversalist thrust of Christianity If weaccept Sassenrsquos analysis which we must giventhe overwhelming evidence then we areinescapably put in the situation of having tore-think the relationship between the churchand the state In fact as the nation-states of the19th and 20th century are unbundled andnew forms of political and legal rights emergein de-territorialized and de-nationalizedforms of political self-determination then thechurch itself will have to face its de-national-ization and de-territorialization At the sametime however one of the fundamental condi-tions of the presence of the church in the 21stcentury will have to be that it must havelearned the lessons of the last 500 years ofcolonialism imperialism and post-colonial-ism This means that the challenge is dual Onthe one hand the new church must find aplace beyond the nation-states of political

modernity but on the other hand it must doso with a post-colonialist and post-imperialistattitude In the age of global transformationsthe new church cannot and will not be able toserve as an agent of globalization for the newimperial masters that began to profile them-selves in the horizon namely a united front ofEuropean nations (an expanded NATO) atechnological elite bent on re-designingnature and a cosmopolitan nobility withoutcontrols allegiances or consciences

Fourth and finally I think that anotherextremely important challenge has to do withthe insight that cities are the places wherecultures come to cultivate each other Inother words cities are the places where oldcultures are cannibalized but also carniv-alized where old cultures which are dyingcome to be renewed but also where newcultures are produced from the remains ofold ones (Hamacher 1997) Cities are germi-nals of new cultures Indeed just as we arevery likely to find micro-climates in mostglobal cities we are likely to find culturalenclaves little Italys Chinatowns Japan-towns little Bombays etc These places arewhere the centripetal and centrifugal forcesof homogenization and heterogenizationinteract to produce new cultural formationsUnderlying this new cultural genesis is itsevident and almost presentist character Theprocesses of cultural genesis take place rightin front of our eyes Cultures are notmillennial sedimentations and even thatwhich is peddled as the oldest is a present-day version of the old Most importantlycultures have become something we produceand choose cultures are something which weeither nurture and preserve or abandon anddisavow In all of these cases we are notpassive but active agents of transformationIn this situation the challenge for the newchurch for an urban ministry for the 21stcentury is how to develop an ecclesiology ofcultural diversity How will the new churchparticipate in this cultural genesis that isgerminating in global cities while retaining asense of identity Or conversely how will itretain a sense of cultural identity without

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 23

becoming either ethnocentric or jingoisticabout its cultural bequest without contribut-ing to the ossification of its own culture Onwhat terms can the new church participate inthe creation of new cultures and the preser-vation of successful ones

Conclusion

Cities are the vortex of the convergence ofthe processes of globalization and local-ization Cities are epitomes of glocalizationto use Robertsonrsquos language (1994) They arealso sites of the sedimentation of history Inthis essay I have sough to advance theresearch agenda that would take the ldquoinvisi-ble citiesrdquo of the so-called Third World astheir primary object of analysis At the sametime however I have urged that we look atthe cities in the developed industrializedworld through the eyes of their invisibleinhabitants and citizens immigrants ethnicminorities disenfranchised groups workerswomen and the youth There are invisiblecities within the cities that are so visible inmost urban theory and analysis as well asinvisible cities that remain unseen becausethey are not on the horizon of the academicagendas of researchers in the universities ofthe developed world

In tandem I have suspended judgementon whether to be for or against global-ization not because I do not think that wecan make moral judgments in this case butbecause I think we need to broaden ouranalyses of this new order of things Ideveloped some general points of departurefor a phenomenological analysis of global-ization This particular approach I thinkexhibits how ldquoglobalizationrdquo can and oughtto become a matter for serious philosophicalreflection I have identified the issues ofalterity temporality tradition the distinc-tion between the natural and the syntheticas philosophemes that are substantivelyimpacted by the processes of globalizationYet the phenomenological approach Iarticulate is deliberate in assuming a partic-

ular perspective or angle of approach I havesought to delineate a phenomenology ofglobalization from below The world doesnot disclose itself in the same way to allsubjects much less globalization Thus thephenomenology here presented urges us tolook at the world from below from theperspective of those who seem to be moreadversely than beneficially affected by theprocesses that make up globalization

This is what the ldquobelowrdquo in the subtitle ofthe essay pointed to the below of the poorand destitute the below of those who are notseen and do not register in the radar of socialtheory Furthermore I have tried to furtherqualify that perspective from below byfocusing my attention on the issue of reli-gion Religion clearly can mean manythings but at the very least it means ldquothe sighof the oppressedrdquo and the ldquoencyclopediccompendiumrdquo of a heartless world as Marxput it (1994 p 28) if only because it is theform in which the destitute the most vulner-able in our world express their critiques aswell as hopes I have argued that we ought tolook at cities as germinals of new culturesand that if we want to trace the emergentcultures of those ldquobelowrdquo then we betterlook at religious movements In what waysare the religious language of the oppressedand disenfranchised of the invisible cities ofglobalization critiques and resistances toglobalization This is clearly a researchdesideratum rather than a description oreven assessment

Note

1 I want to thank Bob Catterall for encouraging me towrite this article and for his comments on earlyversions of it I also want to thank Lois AnnLorentzen and Nelson Maldonado Torres who readit with great care and made substantive suggestionscorrections and criticisms that have made meunderstand better my own project I also want tothank Enrique Dussel Jurgen Habermas WalterMignolo and Santiago Castro-Gomez with whom Ihave discussed many of the ideas here developedand who have given me impetus to continue alongthis line with their own pioneering works

24 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Bibliography

Adorno TW (1984) lsquoThe idea of natural historyrsquo Telos60 pp 31ndash42

Amin S (1996) Capitalism in the Age of GlobalizationThe Management of Contemporary Society Londonand New York Zed Books

Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large CulturalDimensions of Globalization MinneapolisUniversity of Minnesota Press

Appiah KA (1992) In My Fatherrsquos House Africa in thePhilosophy of Culture New York Oxford UniversityPress

Aronowitz S (2000) The Knowledge FactoryDismantling the Corporate University and CreatingTrue Higher Learning Boston Beacon Press

Barber BR (1995) Jihad vs McWorld How Globalismand Tribalism are Reshaping the World New YorkBallantine Books

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1993) lsquoA globalizingeconomy some implications and consequencesrsquo inB Mazlish and R Buultjens (eds) ConceptualizingGlobal History pp 153ndash172 Boulder COWestview Press

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1994) Global DreamsImperial Corporations and the New World OrderNew York Simon amp Schuster

Barnouw E (1990 [1975]) Tube of Plenty TheEvolution of American Television New YorkOxford University Press

Baudrillard J (1981) For a Critique of the PoliticalEconomy of the Sign St Louis MO Telos Press

Bauman Z (1998a) Globalization The HumanConsequences New York Columbia UniversityPress

Bauman Z (1998b) lsquoPostmodern religionrsquo in P Heelas(ed) Religion Modernity and PostmodernityCambridge Blackwell

Beck U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung Frankfurt amMain Suhrkamp

Bell D (1976) The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism New York Basic Books

Benford G (1999) Deep Time How HumanityCommunicates Across Millenia New York AvonBooks Inc

Beyer P (1994) Religion and Globalization LondonSage

Brahm Jr G and Driscoll M (eds) (1995) ProstheticTerritories Politics and Hypertechnologies BoulderCO Westview

Bretherton C and Ponton G (eds) (1996) GlobalPolitics An Introduction Cambridge Blackwell

Calvino I (1974) Invisible Cities New York HarcourtBrace Jovanovich

Casanova J (1994) Public Religions in the ModernWorld Chicago University of Chicago Press

Castells M (1996ndash8) The Information Age EconomySociety and Culture Vol 1 The Rise of the

Network Society Vol 2 The Power of Identity Vol3 End of Millenium Malden MA and OxfordBlackwell Publishers

Chaunu P (1974) Historie science sociale la dureelrsquoespace et lrsquohomme a lrsquoepoque moderne ParisSociete drsquoedition drsquoenseignement superieur

Clark RP (1997) The Global Imperative AnInterpretative History of the Spread of HumankindBoulder CO Westview Press

Costello P (1993) World Historians and Their GoalsTwentieth-century Answers to Modernism DeKalbNorthern Illinois University Press

Dawkins K (1997) Gene Wars The Politics ofBiotechnology New York Seven Stories Press

de Benoist A (1996) lsquoConfronting globalizationrsquo Telos108 pp 117ndash137

Dussel E (1998) Etica de la Liberacion en la edad deglobalizacion y de la exclusion Madrid EditorialTrotta

Elias N (1992) Time An Essay Cambridge MA BasilBlackwell

Featherstone M (1995) Undoing CultureGlobalization Postmodernism and Identity LondonSage Publications

Fritsche J (1999) Historical Destiny and NationalSocialism in Heideggerrsquos Being and Time Berkeleyand Los Angeles University of California Press

Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of SocietyCambridge Polity Press

Giddens A (1987) Social Theory and ModernSociology Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of ModernityCambridge Polity Press

Gray J (1998) False Dawn The Delusions of GlobalCapitalism London Granta Books

Grossberg L (1999) lsquoSpeculations and articulations ofglobalizationrsquo Polygraph 11 pp 11ndash48

Habermas J (1992) Postmetaphysical ThinkingPhilosophical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (1998) The Inclusion of the Other Studiesin Political Theory Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (2001) The Postnational ConstellationPolitical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Hall Sir Peter (1998) Cities in Civilization New YorkPantheon Books

Hamacher W (1997) lsquoOne 2 many multiculturalismsrsquoin H de Vries and S Weber (eds) ViolenceIdentity and Self-determination Stanford CAStanford University Press

Haraway D (1991) Simians Cyborgs and WomenThe Reinvention of Nature New York Routledge

Hardt M and Negri A (2000) Empire CambridgeMA Harvard University Press

Harvey D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity AnEnquiry into the Origins of Cultural ChangeCambridge MA Basil Blackwell

Hayles NK (1999) How we Became PosthumanVirtual Bodies in Cybernetics Literature and

14 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

made up of the social world and the naturalworld Each one has its own rhythms andtime (Kubler 1962 Elias 1992 Heidegger1992 Benford 1999) In light of this weshould speak of a biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time (Wal-lerstein 1991) Biomorphic space-time is theway space and time are experienced by theindividual The clock that measures thisspace-time might be said to be the biologicalclock of each human being Social space-timeis what social groups societies communitieslive and experience This space-time is meas-ured in generations historical processesevents the rise and fall of cities The motor ofthis space-time is the level of socio-technicaldevelopment of a society its infra-structuresand super-structures World space-time is thepace at which the natural world evolves andtransforms seasons come and go rivers runand dry up mountains erode plains dry upand become deserts and forests are cut downand grow up or turn into shrubbery andwasteland The further back we look in thehistory of humanity the more disjointed andseparate were the rhythms at which thesedifferent clocks ran and operated

Today there is a convergence of the speedsof these different space-times If we comparethe speed of world space-time and bio-morphic space-time we find that they arerunning almost simultaneously In otherwords the more our own life-spans arelengthened and world space-time the timeor speed at which the world itself changesshrinks the more unstable and local are ourworld-views or images of the world Cosmo-logical views as well as abstract universalitywere able to be sustained as long as the worlddid not seem not to change and humans hadsuch short life-spans that any substantivechange in the world was not noticeable andexperienceable by any two or three genera-tions Pierre Chaunu (1974) remarked thatone of the fundamental elements in thepossibility for the communication of knowl-edge was the lengthening of the life-spans ofhumans during and after the 16th centuryToday we have the convergence of unprece-

dented human life-spans (to the extent thatsome societies are registering the divergentvectors of the general ageing of their popula-tions and the lowering of infant mortalitywhere both are clearly a function of theimprovement in general medicine and itshaving been made more broadly available)with unprecedentedly accelerated worldchanges The latter is not simply a meremirage occasioned by almost synchronousworld communication It is the case that weare changing the face of the planet in waysthat not just generations but individuals areable to note and distinctly remember In thisway we can talk about the malleability oftradition and the arbitrariness of history Inother words what Harvey and Giddenscalled respectively the compression and col-lapse of space-time manifests itself in thecontemporary plurification of historicalmethodologies and re-narrativation of histo-ries as well as the skepticism that anyhistorical chronology is not a function ofsome ideological agenda Historical revisionhas become the daily bread of the historicallycynical masses of peoples who cannot read inhistory the telos of either emancipation orrationality In the age of globalization reasondoes not entail freedom nor revolution free-dom nor reason revolution In this way wecan say with Heelas Lash and Morris that welive in an post-traditional or de-tradition-alized world in which these notations thatgave cohesion and direction to the project ofmodernity have been superseded or ren-dered ideological and historicized (Heelas etal 1996)

Third any phenomenology of globaliza-tion must also begin with what I take to be anequally momentous transformation ofhuman societies and this has to do with themega-urbanization of the world We can saythat for most of its history most of humanityhas been rural Cities developed as append-ages to large agricultural areas Cities werefunctional principles of rural areas Even-tually this relationship reversed but onlyafter the city ceased to be a communicationnode for agricultural exchange Cities started

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 15

to acquire their independence when theycould produce their own commoditiesnamely knowledge and political power Thisonly began to happen after the Renaissancewhen major cities were not just ports but alsocentres of learning culture and politicalpower (Hall 1998) This trend howeveronly takes off when industrialization allowscities to become their own productive cen-tres even if they still remain tied to ruralcentres The reversal of the relationshipbetween rural and urban areas howeverbegan to shift in the 1950s during these yearsalready 30 of all humanity lived in citiesThe United Nations projects that by the year2005 50 of humanity will live in citiesHere we must pause and reflect that thismeans that a substantive part of humanitywill still remain rural and that most of thoselsquofarmersrsquo and lsquopeasantsrsquo will be in so-calledThird World countries Nonetheless as EricHobsbawn remarked in his work The Age ofExtremes the ldquomost dramatic and far-reach-ing social change of the second half of the[the twentieth century] is the death of thepeasantryrdquo (Hobsbawn 1994 p 289) Theother side of this reversal of the relationshipbetween city and country is that most mega-cities will be in what is called the ThirdWorld By the third millennium the 10 mostpopulated metropolises of the World will beneither in Europe nor in the USA

These trends can be attributed to a varietyof factors The most important factor in theelimination of the rural is the industrializa-tion of agriculture a process that reached itszenith with the so-called ldquogreen revolutionrdquoof the 1950s and 1960s Under the industrial-ization of agriculture we must understandnot just the introduction of better tools butthe homogenization of agricultural produc-tion by which I mean the introduction on aglobal scale of the mono-cultivo (Shiva1993) We must also include here the elimina-tion of self-subsistent forms of farmingthrough the elimination of self-renewing bio-diverse eco-systems One of the most effec-tive ways however in which the city hasimposed itself over the countryside is

through the projection of images that desta-bilized the sense of tradition and culturalcontinuity so fundamental to the rhythms ofthe countryside Through television radioand now the internet the city assaults thefabric of the countryside Tradition is under-mined by the promises and riches projectedby the tube of plenty the cornucopia of otherpossibilities the television and its world ofinfo-tainment (see Baumanrsquos wonderful dis-cussion of how under the globalization ofentertainment the Benthamian Panopticonturns into the MacWorldInfotainment Syn-opticon (1998a pp 53ndash54))

Indeed one of the most characteristicaspects of globalization is what is called thedecreasing importance of the local the statethe national We therefore need to speakwith Jurgen Habermas and Paul Kennedy ofa post-national constellation in which sover-eign nation-states as territorially localizedhave become less important less in controlof their own spatiality (Kennedy 1993Habermas 2001) But what is forgotten isthat there is a simultaneous process oflocalization in which place acquires a newsignificance certain spaces of course (Feath-erstone 1995) The city is the site at whichthe forces of the local and the global meetthe site where the forces of transnationalfinance capital and the local labour marketsand national infra-structures enter into con-flict and contestation over the city AsSaskia Sassen writes

ldquoThe city has indeed emerged as a site fornew claims by global capital which uses thecity as an lsquoorganizational commodityrsquo butalso by disadvantage sectors of the urbanpopulation which in large cities arefrequently as internationalized a presence asis capital The denationalizing of urbanspace and the formation of new claims bytransnational actors and involvingcontestation raise the questionmdashwhose cityis itrdquo (Sassen 1998 p xx)

The city in fact has become the crossroadfor new denationalizing politics in whichglobal actors capitals and moving peoples

16 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

enter into conflict across a transnationalurban system

Habermas has noted with acuity that oneof the characteristics of the 18th and 19thcenturies was their pronounced fears of theldquomassrdquo ldquothe crowdrdquo (Habermas 2001 p39) Such fears were summarized in the titleof the prescient work by Ortega y GassetThe Revolt of the Masses (1985) As wasnoted already the 18th and the 19th centuriessignalled the reversal of the relationshipbetween countryside and city This reversalmeant the rapid urbanization and demo-graphic explosion in cities which accompanythe rapid industrialization of certain metro-polises of the West London Berlin NewYork Chicago Newark Mexico City PortoAlegre and the non-West New DehliTokyo Beijing Cairo etc Urbanization andIndustrialization gave rise to the spectre ofthe irascible insatiable uncontrollable massthat would raze everything in its path Threeclassical responses emerged Sorel and thecelebration of the creative power of anar-chical and explosive unorganized mass mobi-lization the Marxist-Leninist and theattempt to domesticate and train the creativeand transformative power of social unrestthrough the development of a party machin-ery that would guide the ire and discontentof gathered masses of unemployed andemployed workers and the conservative andreactionary response of an Edmund Burkebut which is also echoed in the works ofphilosophers like Heidegger which dis-dained and vilified the common folk themass in a simple term Das Man The crowdthe mass is consumed and distracted byprattle and curiosity as it wallows in themiasma of inauthenticity and cowardness(Fritsche 1999)

Today such attitudes seem not just foreignbut also unrealistic Most of our experience isdetermined by a continuous mingling withcrowds and large undifferentiated masses ofpeople We get on the road and we areconfronted with traffic jams we get on thesubway and people accost and touch us fromall directions We live in continuous friction

with the stranger the other May we suggestthat the ldquoOtherrdquo has become such an impor-tant point of departure for philosophicalreflection precisely because we exist in such acontinuous propinquity with it Indeed theOther is no longer simply a phantasmagor-ical presence projected and barely discern-ible beyond the boundaries of the ecumenethe polis and the frontiers of the nation-stateAt the same time the discourse about theldquootherrdquo what is called the politics of alteritymarks a shift from the negative discourse ofanxiety and fear epitomized in the termldquoanomierdquo so well diagnosed by DurkheimSimmel and Freud and so aptly described byChristopher Lasch (1979) to the positivediscourse of solidarity inclusion acceptancetolerance citizenship and justice so welldiagnosed and described by Zymunt Bauman(1998b) Ulrich Beck (1997) Anthony Gid-dens (1990) and Jurgen Habermas (2001)

Are there any morals to be extracted fromthis profound transformation in the wayhumanity in general understands itself Forthe longest period of the history of human-kind groups remained both sheltered fromand inured to otherness by the solidity andstability of their traditions and their worldsCultures remained fairly segregated maps ofthe world in which the foreign strange andunknown was relegated beyond the bound-aries of the controllable and surveyable Tothis extent lsquoothernessrsquo was legislated over byreligion the state nature and even historynamely those centres of gravity of cultureand images of the world In an age in whichall traditions are under constant revision andhuman temporality converges with the age ofthe world itself then lsquoothernessrsquo appearsbefore us as naked unmediated otherness weare all others before each other In otherwords neither our sense of identity nor thesense of difference of the other are given apriori they are always discovered consti-tuted and dismantled in the very processes ofencounter The other was always constitutedfor us by extrinsic forces Now the other isconstituted in the very process of our iden-tity formation but in a contingent fashion

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 17

We make others as we make ourselves Thisreflection links up with some insights thatEnrique Dussel has had with respect to therelationship between the emergence of citiesand the development of the first codes ofethics the Hammurabi Code and the BookN of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Dussel1998) Such codes arose precisely becauseindividuals were thrown into the proximityof each other and were thus confronted witheach otherrsquos vulnerability and injurabilityThe injuction to take care of the poor theindigent the orphan the widow the invalidcould only arise out of the urban experienceof the contiguity with the injurable flesh ofthe stranger Today the experience of theindigent other is of the immigrant the exiledthe refugee who build their enclaves in theshadows of the glamorous city of transna-tional capital (King 1990 Sassen 1999) Forthis reason the other and the immigrant areinterchangeable but this also raises the issueof the new global city as a space for therepresentation and formation of post-colo-nial identities Geo-cities are spaces for thereconfiguration of image the imaginationand the imaginary as Arjun Appaduraiargued (1996) In this sense the centrality ofthe urban experience for humanity meansthat otherness is not going to be a meremetaphysical or even phenomenological cat-egory and concern Under the reign of thecity Otherness has become quotidian andpractical

Fourth another fundamental point ofdeparture for a phenomenology of global-ization will have to be the analysis of theplace of technology in our everyday lives Iwould like to understand technology in twosenses First in its broadest sense as ldquothe useof scientific knowledge to specify ways ofdoing things in a reproducible wayrdquo (Bell1976 p 29) Second as a prosthesis of thehuman body Technology to paraphrase awonderful aphorism of William Burroughsis the mind wanting more body I will discussfirst the former sense of technology as ascientific specification for the iterable way ofdoing things In this sense then a hospital is

a social technology like agriculture and cattleraising are material technologies By the sametoken prisons asylums and ghettos are socialtechnologies There is however somethingunique about technology in the 20th centuryand that is that technology itself has becomean object of technology in other words theuse of science in order to produce ever moreefficient ways of doing things in ever morereproducible ways itself has become a tech-nological quest This technology of technol-ogy is what one might call the institutional-ization of invention Alfred NorthWhitehead noted that ldquothe greatest inventionof the 19th century was the invention of themethod of inventionrdquo (Whitehead 1925 p141) What Whitehead attributes to the 19thcentury reached its true apogee in the secondhalf of the 20th century with the institu-tionalization of the research universityWhile the programme of the research uni-versity goes back to the German ideal of theuniversity it is in the USA that this ideagained its highest formalization and statesupport Without question we have to attrib-ute the greatest technological breakthroughsof the 20th century to this unique con-vergence of the state the military and theresearch university what Eisenhower calledthe militaryndashindustrial complex and whatwe now with hindsight should more appro-priately call the militaryndashuniversityndashindus-trial complex (Kenney 1986 Aronowitz2000)

The rise of the nation-state also signifiedthe rise of state-sponsored education and thestate university The university plays a dualrole On the one hand it has the function ofpreparing citizens and workers for the mate-rial and cultural-political self-reproductionof society On the other it has the role ofinstitutionalizing scientific investigation theinvention of invention Through the uni-versity the state invests in its future ability totransform its material technologies of self-reproduction Winning Nobel prizes is notjust a matter of pride it is above all aquestion of institutional power to supportimmense research budgets whose actual

18 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

industrial and technical application might befar off into the future This is one of thereasons why the USA has remained a worldpower despite its apparent military stale-mate namely because it still remains thecentre for the production of most techno-logical innovation

Related to the invention of invention whatI called the institutionalization of the tech-nology of technology as its other side is theinterpenetration of technology in everyaspect of our lives Even those who are notdirectly affected by technological revolutionsin their daily life are nonetheless indirectlyaffected insofar as their worlds economiesand cultures are made vulnerable to take-overs and colonization by those who drivethe technological revolutions of today Forthe longest period of the history of humanitytechnology remained distant from the livesand bodies of men and women not because itdid not impact them but because it did sosporadically and in such tangential ways firethe wheel the printing press the metalplough the steam engine the automobileEach technological innovation however hasmeant a further interpenetration betweentool and human body With this I turn to thediscussion of technology as prosthesis thesecond sense of technology I want to con-sider in light of a phenomenology ofglobalization

A technology is a way of doing things inways that can be reproduced again andagain and that therefore can be taught andpassed on Culture is in this sense the mostcomplex and important technology of all Inthis sense a technology is a way for asociety to extend itself across time fromgeneration to generation century to century(Giddens 1984 1987) A technology gen-erally instantiated itself in tools Tools allowparticular individuals to reach beyond theboundaries of their own bodies A tool is anextension of a particular bodily organ thataugments its original performance Tool andbody however have remained relatively dis-tinct even if one can claim that the hand isa product of our invention of tools

(Rothenberg 1993) Recognition of the dis-tinctness between tool and body does notentail the negation of their dialectical inter-dependence and co-modification Their dis-tinctness was sustained by what I havealready referred to above as the temporalityof humans and the time of the world Whenthe time of humans and the world convergewhat mediates their encounter tools hasalready fused with the body or has alreadymade the world immediate Our experienceof the world is already so mediated by ourtechnological tools that we cannot distin-guish the world from the tool and thesefrom the body We are our tools We are ourtechnological prosthesis because they arethe world (Brahm and Driscoll 1995) Butthis does not mean that technology is itselftransparent Rather technology itself hasbecome like our bodies in the sense that wedo not know how our livers hearts orbrains work we just assume that they willdo what they were designed to do and ifthey break down then we go to aspecialist

Everywhere we are surrounded by techno-logical devices which have insinuated them-selves in our lives and without which wecannot do the watch the telephone the carthe television but also toothpaste X-raysvaccines birth control pills condoms sunscreen eye-glasses shavers purified andchlorinated water and so on

What I am talking about can be illustratedby comparing Mary Shelleyrsquos Frankensteinin which a creation out of human partsbecomes monstrous precisely because itentails the complete instrumentalization ofour bodies and thus a sacrilage of its allegeddivine naturalness and Donna Harawayrsquosborgs which demonstrate and theorize towhat extent we are always already synthetic(Haraway 1991) There is no nature outsidethe confines of the laboratory Resistance isfutile to the logic of technology because weare all already borg we are products of ourtechnologies and nature exists only as anArcadian fantasy This reading should not betaken to be suggesting that nature does not

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 19

exist in the sense that it is a fiction the mirageof radical social constructivism Rather thepoint is to highlight the ways in which natureis to be thought of in terms of what today wecall the lsquorecursive loopsrsquo between technologyand nature in which nature is already anlsquoartefactrsquo and lsquomachinesrsquo are natural (Hayles1999) Indeed appropriating Marxrsquos languagefrom his 1844 manuscripts we have to talkabout the humanization of machines and themechanization of humanity

Is there a moral to be extracted by theinterpenetration of humans and their techno-logical prosthesis to the point that youcannot distinguish them any longer I wouldsay that a Heideggerian response to thisquestion is anachronistic and indefensibleOn the other hand a dia-mat in the sense ofEngelsrsquos dialectical materialism will not doeither Science is neither metaphysically badnor a malleable ideological epiphenomenonAgainst these two positions I would advo-cate what has been called Kranzbergrsquos lawwhich reads ldquotechnology is neither good norbad nor is it neutralrdquo (Castells 1996 Vol 1p 65)

I would like to summarize my reflectionsby suggesting that once a phenomenology ofglobalization takes seriously the points ofdeparture discussed above we will discoverthat globalization might stand for anotheraxial period This new axial age will becharacterized by at least these four themesfirst the perpetual revolutionizing of pro-duction technologies has turned into thetechnology of innovation in such a way thatthe generation of capital is relocated to theproduction of new information technologiesand not production and processing of rawmaterials Second because of the almostinstantaneous information transmission andreception across the world and the con-vergence of natural historical and personaltemporalities we have the effect of the de-transcendentalization and temporalization oftradition These de-transcendentalizationsand temporalizations suggest that our imagesof the world will be at the reach of our owndesign In this sense we will be able to speak

of the true secularization of the world and itscomplete humanization Third is the routini-zation and de-metaphysicalization of other-ness brought about by the hyper-urbaniza-tion of humanity Otherness will become aproduct of society and in this sense we willhave to talk of regimes of alterization Thelsquootherrsquo then will become a continuouspresence that will require our constant con-cern and vigilance Fourth is the dissolutionof the boundary between natural and syn-thetic body and tool technology and natureWe will have to speak then of the age inwhich humans have become their own crea-tions and in which the directions of thereproduction of both mind and body cultureand technology will become a concern ofpolitical practice of paramount importance

The image of the world projected byglobalization is one which collapses thedifferences between biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time whatwe see is what we get To put it in thelanguage of an essay by Theodor Adorno thehistory of nature is no different from thehistory of humanity (Adorno 1984) Global-ization also projects an image of the world inwhich otherness is not external and intract-able but produced from within Finallyglobalization is an image of the world inwhich the natural and the social the createdand uncreated have been brought togetherunder the insight that we have been produc-ing ourselves as we have been producingtools to alter the world Now however theproducing of our tools is not different fromthe production of ourselves and our worldIn the image of the world projected byglobalization the world is humanity lookingat itself through its eyes and not the eyes ofa god history or nature

III City of angels

ldquoWho is the observer when it concerns thequestion about the function of religion thesystem of religion itself or science as anexternal observerrdquo (Luhmann 2000 p 118)

20 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

The kind of phenomenology of globalizationthat I sketched above allows us to ask aboutthe kinds of challenges religion faces in anage of globalization For religion appears as aresource of images concepts traditions andpractices that can allow individuals andcommunities to deal with a world that ischanging around them by the hour (Robert-son and Garrett 1991 Luhmann 2000) Inthe new Unubersichtlichkeit [unsurveyabil-ity] of our global society religion appears ascompendium of intuitions that have not beenextinguished by the so-called process ofsecularization (Mendieta forthcoming a)Most importantly however religion cannotbe dismissed or derided because it is theprivileged if not the primary form in whichthe impoverished masses of the invisiblecities of the world (those cities to which Ipointed in the first part of this essay)articulate their hopes as well as critique theirworld

The first challenge to religion that ourphenomenology of globalization allow us toarticulate has to do with the lsquode-transcenden-talizing of othernessrsquo or what I also wouldlike to call the lsquoroutinization of othernessrsquoThere is a correlation between the wayhumanity has conceptualized otherness met-aphysically and conceptually on the onehand and humanityrsquos relationship to real andconcrete otherness as it has been experiencedexistentially and phenomenologically on theother hand This correlation has been medi-ated by humanityrsquos decreasing ruralism Inother words the less rural and thus the moreurban dwelling humans have become theless other is the otherness that we can thinkof or dream up The suggestion is that themetaphysics of alterity that has guided somuch of Western theology and religiousthinking over the last 2000 years has beendetermined by a particular asymmetrybetween the country and the city For thelongest history of humanity most societieshave been farming and rural-dwelling com-munities and associations Contact betweenextremely different communities and societ-ies was sporadic and rare and when contact

did occurred this was meditated by citydwellers and the long memory of popularmythologies But as was noted above in thedawning 21st century most humans will becity dwellers Furthermore In the 21st cen-tury most humanity will be conglomerated inthe mega-urbes of the Third World Underthis circumstance the holy other the abso-lutely other will be deflated Alterity and theextraordinary what can also be called thetremendum are de-mystified and de-met-aphysicalized (Habermas 1992 Placher1996) Either everyone will be a stranger orno one will be because we will all bestrangers in a city of strangers In such asituation otherness will have become a rou-tine an un-extra-ordinary event How thenare we to think divine alterity the othernessof the holy in a situation in which onto-logically and metaphysically all alterity hasbeen deflated demoted rendered normallevelled to the cotidian Are we in a situationof having to ldquorisk a new idea of holinessrdquo asBarry Taylor Pastor at the Sanctuary Churchin Santa Monica put it This would have tobe a holiness which is not other worldly buta holiness which is about the difference anduniqueness of others those who are oureveryday other with whom we ride thesubway with whom we walk the streets ofpopulated mega-urbes of the new age withwhom we share in anonymity the crowdedspaces of the new cities The real andmetaphorical wilderness of the world of itsjungles and forests of its undiscovered con-tinents and untamed seas of its unmappeddeserts and unnavigated rivers were excusesas well instigations to go searching for godbeyond the familial the urbane the too closeand already lsquodomesticatedrsquo God was beyondthe world other than the world Now thequestion is how do we discover the other inthe mundane difference of every fellowhuman being and the crowded city ofstrangers

The second challenge has to do with thecity as locus of the culture of consumptionas the site for an ethos of immediacyhedonism and hyper-excitation Sassen

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 21

speaks of the city as the crossroads of aconfrontation between the flows of capitaland the flows of peoples One of the waysthese flows clash in cities is through theconfrontation between cultures that isbetween different modalities of life Themore people become urban dwellers themore people are exposed to the cornucopiaof cultural possibilities It is not just thatmore people are in cities it is also that morepeople are seeking to participate in thestandards of life promised by urban dwellingThe challenges are unprecedented We arepresently choking in our own refuse in ourown garbage The psychological toil mustalso be unprecedented The level of unmetexpectations unfilled desires the gapbetween universally promised but exorbi-tantly expensive commodities that shatteredself-images and worth and that are availableto a relatively small fraction of the worldpopulation has grown exponentially Thereis another underside to the city as thecrossroads of the clash of modalities of lifeThe more cities grow the more they exerttheir pull on the so-called hinterland therural areas The more agriculture is mecha-nized and industrialized the more we adoptbiotechnology the more superfluous ldquofarm-ersrdquo become At the same time the expansionof telecommunications television and paidfor television and satellite connections havemade it easier to link up and peer into theldquotube of plentyrdquo to use that wonderfulphrase by Erik Barnouw (1990 [1975]) Thecity literally and metaphorically consumes itshinterland its outlying areas of supply itconsumes its resources and produce but alsoits cultures and its peoples

It is perhaps unnecessary to underscoreagain that most of the consumption of ruralresources is taking place in the metropolisesof the so-called First World So not onlymust we address the rampant and rapaciousconsumerism of cities in general but also theparticularly scandalous and grotesque asym-metry between the consumption of FirstWorld cities and Third World cities Thisissue becomes particularly pressing when in

the so-called advanced nations of the worldwe have thinkers intellectuals and criticstalking about a politics and culture of inclu-sion and tolerance (Habermas 1998) Thispolitics of inclusion is articulated with thebest intentions in mind The assumptionguiding it is that people throughout theworld would be better if they could partici-pate more equitably in the same kinds of so-called basic needs and luxuries that wewesterners enjoy But there is somethingprofoundly disingenuous and deleteriouslynaotildeve about such a view In some cases thepoverty of those across the world to whomwe would like to extend our standard ofliving is due precisely to our luxury Thatwhich we want to share is the cause of theprivation we want to alleviate Thus perhapsthe agenda should not be one of inclusionbut of dismantling the system that occa-sioned in the first place the exclusions webenefited and continue to benefit from

In this situation then the challengebecomes how to think of an urban culture offrugality The challenge is how to translatethe religious message and teaching of povertyas a holy way as a holy calling into a secularvalue a secular calling Another way ofputting it would be how do we translate thevisions of the desert fathers St Francis ofAssisi Mohandas Gandhi into an urbanvision for a spiritually starving youth Oralternatively if we think of what ArnoldToynbee and Eric Hobsbawn said about the20th century namely that its greatestachievement was the expansion of the middleclass then the goal for the 21st centuryshould be the expansion of a globalizedldquoliving level classrdquo In other words we haveto develop a culture for which the greatestachievement is not that everyone else will livelike us but that we will live at the level thatallows the most people to share in the mostfundamental goods potable water clean airinfant nutrition to sustain healthy standardsof unstunted growth and the possibility ofbasic education Here I would have to saythat I concur with Hardt and Negri on theircanonization of Assisi as a saint in the

22 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

hagiography of revolutionary militancy(2000 p 413)

The third challenge that our phenomenol-ogy of globalization allows us to elucidate hasto do with one of its central locus of analysisnamely the city If cities have become the siteswhere the unbundling of the state takes placethat is if we take cities to be the sites for thede-nationalizing of the national and if we atthe same time take the city as the locus of anemergent juridification or process of legal-ization of new forms of relationships then arewe not in need of having to re-think therelationship between the legal and politicalstructures of the emergent supra-nationalstate and the para- or extra-statist ldquochurchrdquoAnother way of putting it would be to notethat the church at least in the West antecedesthe modern nation-state In fact the churchwas the state and that partly because of thisthe quest for modernity the process ofmodernization entailed a secularization ofstate and legal structures In the process thechurchrsquos sphere of operation becamerestricted or constrained by the spaces drawnby the boundaries of nation-states Churchesand denominations became identified withnational boundaries which took place not-withstanding the underlying and fundamentaluniversalist thrust of Christianity If weaccept Sassenrsquos analysis which we must giventhe overwhelming evidence then we areinescapably put in the situation of having tore-think the relationship between the churchand the state In fact as the nation-states of the19th and 20th century are unbundled andnew forms of political and legal rights emergein de-territorialized and de-nationalizedforms of political self-determination then thechurch itself will have to face its de-national-ization and de-territorialization At the sametime however one of the fundamental condi-tions of the presence of the church in the 21stcentury will have to be that it must havelearned the lessons of the last 500 years ofcolonialism imperialism and post-colonial-ism This means that the challenge is dual Onthe one hand the new church must find aplace beyond the nation-states of political

modernity but on the other hand it must doso with a post-colonialist and post-imperialistattitude In the age of global transformationsthe new church cannot and will not be able toserve as an agent of globalization for the newimperial masters that began to profile them-selves in the horizon namely a united front ofEuropean nations (an expanded NATO) atechnological elite bent on re-designingnature and a cosmopolitan nobility withoutcontrols allegiances or consciences

Fourth and finally I think that anotherextremely important challenge has to do withthe insight that cities are the places wherecultures come to cultivate each other Inother words cities are the places where oldcultures are cannibalized but also carniv-alized where old cultures which are dyingcome to be renewed but also where newcultures are produced from the remains ofold ones (Hamacher 1997) Cities are germi-nals of new cultures Indeed just as we arevery likely to find micro-climates in mostglobal cities we are likely to find culturalenclaves little Italys Chinatowns Japan-towns little Bombays etc These places arewhere the centripetal and centrifugal forcesof homogenization and heterogenizationinteract to produce new cultural formationsUnderlying this new cultural genesis is itsevident and almost presentist character Theprocesses of cultural genesis take place rightin front of our eyes Cultures are notmillennial sedimentations and even thatwhich is peddled as the oldest is a present-day version of the old Most importantlycultures have become something we produceand choose cultures are something which weeither nurture and preserve or abandon anddisavow In all of these cases we are notpassive but active agents of transformationIn this situation the challenge for the newchurch for an urban ministry for the 21stcentury is how to develop an ecclesiology ofcultural diversity How will the new churchparticipate in this cultural genesis that isgerminating in global cities while retaining asense of identity Or conversely how will itretain a sense of cultural identity without

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 23

becoming either ethnocentric or jingoisticabout its cultural bequest without contribut-ing to the ossification of its own culture Onwhat terms can the new church participate inthe creation of new cultures and the preser-vation of successful ones

Conclusion

Cities are the vortex of the convergence ofthe processes of globalization and local-ization Cities are epitomes of glocalizationto use Robertsonrsquos language (1994) They arealso sites of the sedimentation of history Inthis essay I have sough to advance theresearch agenda that would take the ldquoinvisi-ble citiesrdquo of the so-called Third World astheir primary object of analysis At the sametime however I have urged that we look atthe cities in the developed industrializedworld through the eyes of their invisibleinhabitants and citizens immigrants ethnicminorities disenfranchised groups workerswomen and the youth There are invisiblecities within the cities that are so visible inmost urban theory and analysis as well asinvisible cities that remain unseen becausethey are not on the horizon of the academicagendas of researchers in the universities ofthe developed world

In tandem I have suspended judgementon whether to be for or against global-ization not because I do not think that wecan make moral judgments in this case butbecause I think we need to broaden ouranalyses of this new order of things Ideveloped some general points of departurefor a phenomenological analysis of global-ization This particular approach I thinkexhibits how ldquoglobalizationrdquo can and oughtto become a matter for serious philosophicalreflection I have identified the issues ofalterity temporality tradition the distinc-tion between the natural and the syntheticas philosophemes that are substantivelyimpacted by the processes of globalizationYet the phenomenological approach Iarticulate is deliberate in assuming a partic-

ular perspective or angle of approach I havesought to delineate a phenomenology ofglobalization from below The world doesnot disclose itself in the same way to allsubjects much less globalization Thus thephenomenology here presented urges us tolook at the world from below from theperspective of those who seem to be moreadversely than beneficially affected by theprocesses that make up globalization

This is what the ldquobelowrdquo in the subtitle ofthe essay pointed to the below of the poorand destitute the below of those who are notseen and do not register in the radar of socialtheory Furthermore I have tried to furtherqualify that perspective from below byfocusing my attention on the issue of reli-gion Religion clearly can mean manythings but at the very least it means ldquothe sighof the oppressedrdquo and the ldquoencyclopediccompendiumrdquo of a heartless world as Marxput it (1994 p 28) if only because it is theform in which the destitute the most vulner-able in our world express their critiques aswell as hopes I have argued that we ought tolook at cities as germinals of new culturesand that if we want to trace the emergentcultures of those ldquobelowrdquo then we betterlook at religious movements In what waysare the religious language of the oppressedand disenfranchised of the invisible cities ofglobalization critiques and resistances toglobalization This is clearly a researchdesideratum rather than a description oreven assessment

Note

1 I want to thank Bob Catterall for encouraging me towrite this article and for his comments on earlyversions of it I also want to thank Lois AnnLorentzen and Nelson Maldonado Torres who readit with great care and made substantive suggestionscorrections and criticisms that have made meunderstand better my own project I also want tothank Enrique Dussel Jurgen Habermas WalterMignolo and Santiago Castro-Gomez with whom Ihave discussed many of the ideas here developedand who have given me impetus to continue alongthis line with their own pioneering works

24 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Bibliography

Adorno TW (1984) lsquoThe idea of natural historyrsquo Telos60 pp 31ndash42

Amin S (1996) Capitalism in the Age of GlobalizationThe Management of Contemporary Society Londonand New York Zed Books

Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large CulturalDimensions of Globalization MinneapolisUniversity of Minnesota Press

Appiah KA (1992) In My Fatherrsquos House Africa in thePhilosophy of Culture New York Oxford UniversityPress

Aronowitz S (2000) The Knowledge FactoryDismantling the Corporate University and CreatingTrue Higher Learning Boston Beacon Press

Barber BR (1995) Jihad vs McWorld How Globalismand Tribalism are Reshaping the World New YorkBallantine Books

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1993) lsquoA globalizingeconomy some implications and consequencesrsquo inB Mazlish and R Buultjens (eds) ConceptualizingGlobal History pp 153ndash172 Boulder COWestview Press

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1994) Global DreamsImperial Corporations and the New World OrderNew York Simon amp Schuster

Barnouw E (1990 [1975]) Tube of Plenty TheEvolution of American Television New YorkOxford University Press

Baudrillard J (1981) For a Critique of the PoliticalEconomy of the Sign St Louis MO Telos Press

Bauman Z (1998a) Globalization The HumanConsequences New York Columbia UniversityPress

Bauman Z (1998b) lsquoPostmodern religionrsquo in P Heelas(ed) Religion Modernity and PostmodernityCambridge Blackwell

Beck U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung Frankfurt amMain Suhrkamp

Bell D (1976) The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism New York Basic Books

Benford G (1999) Deep Time How HumanityCommunicates Across Millenia New York AvonBooks Inc

Beyer P (1994) Religion and Globalization LondonSage

Brahm Jr G and Driscoll M (eds) (1995) ProstheticTerritories Politics and Hypertechnologies BoulderCO Westview

Bretherton C and Ponton G (eds) (1996) GlobalPolitics An Introduction Cambridge Blackwell

Calvino I (1974) Invisible Cities New York HarcourtBrace Jovanovich

Casanova J (1994) Public Religions in the ModernWorld Chicago University of Chicago Press

Castells M (1996ndash8) The Information Age EconomySociety and Culture Vol 1 The Rise of the

Network Society Vol 2 The Power of Identity Vol3 End of Millenium Malden MA and OxfordBlackwell Publishers

Chaunu P (1974) Historie science sociale la dureelrsquoespace et lrsquohomme a lrsquoepoque moderne ParisSociete drsquoedition drsquoenseignement superieur

Clark RP (1997) The Global Imperative AnInterpretative History of the Spread of HumankindBoulder CO Westview Press

Costello P (1993) World Historians and Their GoalsTwentieth-century Answers to Modernism DeKalbNorthern Illinois University Press

Dawkins K (1997) Gene Wars The Politics ofBiotechnology New York Seven Stories Press

de Benoist A (1996) lsquoConfronting globalizationrsquo Telos108 pp 117ndash137

Dussel E (1998) Etica de la Liberacion en la edad deglobalizacion y de la exclusion Madrid EditorialTrotta

Elias N (1992) Time An Essay Cambridge MA BasilBlackwell

Featherstone M (1995) Undoing CultureGlobalization Postmodernism and Identity LondonSage Publications

Fritsche J (1999) Historical Destiny and NationalSocialism in Heideggerrsquos Being and Time Berkeleyand Los Angeles University of California Press

Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of SocietyCambridge Polity Press

Giddens A (1987) Social Theory and ModernSociology Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of ModernityCambridge Polity Press

Gray J (1998) False Dawn The Delusions of GlobalCapitalism London Granta Books

Grossberg L (1999) lsquoSpeculations and articulations ofglobalizationrsquo Polygraph 11 pp 11ndash48

Habermas J (1992) Postmetaphysical ThinkingPhilosophical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (1998) The Inclusion of the Other Studiesin Political Theory Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (2001) The Postnational ConstellationPolitical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Hall Sir Peter (1998) Cities in Civilization New YorkPantheon Books

Hamacher W (1997) lsquoOne 2 many multiculturalismsrsquoin H de Vries and S Weber (eds) ViolenceIdentity and Self-determination Stanford CAStanford University Press

Haraway D (1991) Simians Cyborgs and WomenThe Reinvention of Nature New York Routledge

Hardt M and Negri A (2000) Empire CambridgeMA Harvard University Press

Harvey D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity AnEnquiry into the Origins of Cultural ChangeCambridge MA Basil Blackwell

Hayles NK (1999) How we Became PosthumanVirtual Bodies in Cybernetics Literature and

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 15

to acquire their independence when theycould produce their own commoditiesnamely knowledge and political power Thisonly began to happen after the Renaissancewhen major cities were not just ports but alsocentres of learning culture and politicalpower (Hall 1998) This trend howeveronly takes off when industrialization allowscities to become their own productive cen-tres even if they still remain tied to ruralcentres The reversal of the relationshipbetween rural and urban areas howeverbegan to shift in the 1950s during these yearsalready 30 of all humanity lived in citiesThe United Nations projects that by the year2005 50 of humanity will live in citiesHere we must pause and reflect that thismeans that a substantive part of humanitywill still remain rural and that most of thoselsquofarmersrsquo and lsquopeasantsrsquo will be in so-calledThird World countries Nonetheless as EricHobsbawn remarked in his work The Age ofExtremes the ldquomost dramatic and far-reach-ing social change of the second half of the[the twentieth century] is the death of thepeasantryrdquo (Hobsbawn 1994 p 289) Theother side of this reversal of the relationshipbetween city and country is that most mega-cities will be in what is called the ThirdWorld By the third millennium the 10 mostpopulated metropolises of the World will beneither in Europe nor in the USA

These trends can be attributed to a varietyof factors The most important factor in theelimination of the rural is the industrializa-tion of agriculture a process that reached itszenith with the so-called ldquogreen revolutionrdquoof the 1950s and 1960s Under the industrial-ization of agriculture we must understandnot just the introduction of better tools butthe homogenization of agricultural produc-tion by which I mean the introduction on aglobal scale of the mono-cultivo (Shiva1993) We must also include here the elimina-tion of self-subsistent forms of farmingthrough the elimination of self-renewing bio-diverse eco-systems One of the most effec-tive ways however in which the city hasimposed itself over the countryside is

through the projection of images that desta-bilized the sense of tradition and culturalcontinuity so fundamental to the rhythms ofthe countryside Through television radioand now the internet the city assaults thefabric of the countryside Tradition is under-mined by the promises and riches projectedby the tube of plenty the cornucopia of otherpossibilities the television and its world ofinfo-tainment (see Baumanrsquos wonderful dis-cussion of how under the globalization ofentertainment the Benthamian Panopticonturns into the MacWorldInfotainment Syn-opticon (1998a pp 53ndash54))

Indeed one of the most characteristicaspects of globalization is what is called thedecreasing importance of the local the statethe national We therefore need to speakwith Jurgen Habermas and Paul Kennedy ofa post-national constellation in which sover-eign nation-states as territorially localizedhave become less important less in controlof their own spatiality (Kennedy 1993Habermas 2001) But what is forgotten isthat there is a simultaneous process oflocalization in which place acquires a newsignificance certain spaces of course (Feath-erstone 1995) The city is the site at whichthe forces of the local and the global meetthe site where the forces of transnationalfinance capital and the local labour marketsand national infra-structures enter into con-flict and contestation over the city AsSaskia Sassen writes

ldquoThe city has indeed emerged as a site fornew claims by global capital which uses thecity as an lsquoorganizational commodityrsquo butalso by disadvantage sectors of the urbanpopulation which in large cities arefrequently as internationalized a presence asis capital The denationalizing of urbanspace and the formation of new claims bytransnational actors and involvingcontestation raise the questionmdashwhose cityis itrdquo (Sassen 1998 p xx)

The city in fact has become the crossroadfor new denationalizing politics in whichglobal actors capitals and moving peoples

16 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

enter into conflict across a transnationalurban system

Habermas has noted with acuity that oneof the characteristics of the 18th and 19thcenturies was their pronounced fears of theldquomassrdquo ldquothe crowdrdquo (Habermas 2001 p39) Such fears were summarized in the titleof the prescient work by Ortega y GassetThe Revolt of the Masses (1985) As wasnoted already the 18th and the 19th centuriessignalled the reversal of the relationshipbetween countryside and city This reversalmeant the rapid urbanization and demo-graphic explosion in cities which accompanythe rapid industrialization of certain metro-polises of the West London Berlin NewYork Chicago Newark Mexico City PortoAlegre and the non-West New DehliTokyo Beijing Cairo etc Urbanization andIndustrialization gave rise to the spectre ofthe irascible insatiable uncontrollable massthat would raze everything in its path Threeclassical responses emerged Sorel and thecelebration of the creative power of anar-chical and explosive unorganized mass mobi-lization the Marxist-Leninist and theattempt to domesticate and train the creativeand transformative power of social unrestthrough the development of a party machin-ery that would guide the ire and discontentof gathered masses of unemployed andemployed workers and the conservative andreactionary response of an Edmund Burkebut which is also echoed in the works ofphilosophers like Heidegger which dis-dained and vilified the common folk themass in a simple term Das Man The crowdthe mass is consumed and distracted byprattle and curiosity as it wallows in themiasma of inauthenticity and cowardness(Fritsche 1999)

Today such attitudes seem not just foreignbut also unrealistic Most of our experience isdetermined by a continuous mingling withcrowds and large undifferentiated masses ofpeople We get on the road and we areconfronted with traffic jams we get on thesubway and people accost and touch us fromall directions We live in continuous friction

with the stranger the other May we suggestthat the ldquoOtherrdquo has become such an impor-tant point of departure for philosophicalreflection precisely because we exist in such acontinuous propinquity with it Indeed theOther is no longer simply a phantasmagor-ical presence projected and barely discern-ible beyond the boundaries of the ecumenethe polis and the frontiers of the nation-stateAt the same time the discourse about theldquootherrdquo what is called the politics of alteritymarks a shift from the negative discourse ofanxiety and fear epitomized in the termldquoanomierdquo so well diagnosed by DurkheimSimmel and Freud and so aptly described byChristopher Lasch (1979) to the positivediscourse of solidarity inclusion acceptancetolerance citizenship and justice so welldiagnosed and described by Zymunt Bauman(1998b) Ulrich Beck (1997) Anthony Gid-dens (1990) and Jurgen Habermas (2001)

Are there any morals to be extracted fromthis profound transformation in the wayhumanity in general understands itself Forthe longest period of the history of human-kind groups remained both sheltered fromand inured to otherness by the solidity andstability of their traditions and their worldsCultures remained fairly segregated maps ofthe world in which the foreign strange andunknown was relegated beyond the bound-aries of the controllable and surveyable Tothis extent lsquoothernessrsquo was legislated over byreligion the state nature and even historynamely those centres of gravity of cultureand images of the world In an age in whichall traditions are under constant revision andhuman temporality converges with the age ofthe world itself then lsquoothernessrsquo appearsbefore us as naked unmediated otherness weare all others before each other In otherwords neither our sense of identity nor thesense of difference of the other are given apriori they are always discovered consti-tuted and dismantled in the very processes ofencounter The other was always constitutedfor us by extrinsic forces Now the other isconstituted in the very process of our iden-tity formation but in a contingent fashion

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 17

We make others as we make ourselves Thisreflection links up with some insights thatEnrique Dussel has had with respect to therelationship between the emergence of citiesand the development of the first codes ofethics the Hammurabi Code and the BookN of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Dussel1998) Such codes arose precisely becauseindividuals were thrown into the proximityof each other and were thus confronted witheach otherrsquos vulnerability and injurabilityThe injuction to take care of the poor theindigent the orphan the widow the invalidcould only arise out of the urban experienceof the contiguity with the injurable flesh ofthe stranger Today the experience of theindigent other is of the immigrant the exiledthe refugee who build their enclaves in theshadows of the glamorous city of transna-tional capital (King 1990 Sassen 1999) Forthis reason the other and the immigrant areinterchangeable but this also raises the issueof the new global city as a space for therepresentation and formation of post-colo-nial identities Geo-cities are spaces for thereconfiguration of image the imaginationand the imaginary as Arjun Appaduraiargued (1996) In this sense the centrality ofthe urban experience for humanity meansthat otherness is not going to be a meremetaphysical or even phenomenological cat-egory and concern Under the reign of thecity Otherness has become quotidian andpractical

Fourth another fundamental point ofdeparture for a phenomenology of global-ization will have to be the analysis of theplace of technology in our everyday lives Iwould like to understand technology in twosenses First in its broadest sense as ldquothe useof scientific knowledge to specify ways ofdoing things in a reproducible wayrdquo (Bell1976 p 29) Second as a prosthesis of thehuman body Technology to paraphrase awonderful aphorism of William Burroughsis the mind wanting more body I will discussfirst the former sense of technology as ascientific specification for the iterable way ofdoing things In this sense then a hospital is

a social technology like agriculture and cattleraising are material technologies By the sametoken prisons asylums and ghettos are socialtechnologies There is however somethingunique about technology in the 20th centuryand that is that technology itself has becomean object of technology in other words theuse of science in order to produce ever moreefficient ways of doing things in ever morereproducible ways itself has become a tech-nological quest This technology of technol-ogy is what one might call the institutional-ization of invention Alfred NorthWhitehead noted that ldquothe greatest inventionof the 19th century was the invention of themethod of inventionrdquo (Whitehead 1925 p141) What Whitehead attributes to the 19thcentury reached its true apogee in the secondhalf of the 20th century with the institu-tionalization of the research universityWhile the programme of the research uni-versity goes back to the German ideal of theuniversity it is in the USA that this ideagained its highest formalization and statesupport Without question we have to attrib-ute the greatest technological breakthroughsof the 20th century to this unique con-vergence of the state the military and theresearch university what Eisenhower calledthe militaryndashindustrial complex and whatwe now with hindsight should more appro-priately call the militaryndashuniversityndashindus-trial complex (Kenney 1986 Aronowitz2000)

The rise of the nation-state also signifiedthe rise of state-sponsored education and thestate university The university plays a dualrole On the one hand it has the function ofpreparing citizens and workers for the mate-rial and cultural-political self-reproductionof society On the other it has the role ofinstitutionalizing scientific investigation theinvention of invention Through the uni-versity the state invests in its future ability totransform its material technologies of self-reproduction Winning Nobel prizes is notjust a matter of pride it is above all aquestion of institutional power to supportimmense research budgets whose actual

18 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

industrial and technical application might befar off into the future This is one of thereasons why the USA has remained a worldpower despite its apparent military stale-mate namely because it still remains thecentre for the production of most techno-logical innovation

Related to the invention of invention whatI called the institutionalization of the tech-nology of technology as its other side is theinterpenetration of technology in everyaspect of our lives Even those who are notdirectly affected by technological revolutionsin their daily life are nonetheless indirectlyaffected insofar as their worlds economiesand cultures are made vulnerable to take-overs and colonization by those who drivethe technological revolutions of today Forthe longest period of the history of humanitytechnology remained distant from the livesand bodies of men and women not because itdid not impact them but because it did sosporadically and in such tangential ways firethe wheel the printing press the metalplough the steam engine the automobileEach technological innovation however hasmeant a further interpenetration betweentool and human body With this I turn to thediscussion of technology as prosthesis thesecond sense of technology I want to con-sider in light of a phenomenology ofglobalization

A technology is a way of doing things inways that can be reproduced again andagain and that therefore can be taught andpassed on Culture is in this sense the mostcomplex and important technology of all Inthis sense a technology is a way for asociety to extend itself across time fromgeneration to generation century to century(Giddens 1984 1987) A technology gen-erally instantiated itself in tools Tools allowparticular individuals to reach beyond theboundaries of their own bodies A tool is anextension of a particular bodily organ thataugments its original performance Tool andbody however have remained relatively dis-tinct even if one can claim that the hand isa product of our invention of tools

(Rothenberg 1993) Recognition of the dis-tinctness between tool and body does notentail the negation of their dialectical inter-dependence and co-modification Their dis-tinctness was sustained by what I havealready referred to above as the temporalityof humans and the time of the world Whenthe time of humans and the world convergewhat mediates their encounter tools hasalready fused with the body or has alreadymade the world immediate Our experienceof the world is already so mediated by ourtechnological tools that we cannot distin-guish the world from the tool and thesefrom the body We are our tools We are ourtechnological prosthesis because they arethe world (Brahm and Driscoll 1995) Butthis does not mean that technology is itselftransparent Rather technology itself hasbecome like our bodies in the sense that wedo not know how our livers hearts orbrains work we just assume that they willdo what they were designed to do and ifthey break down then we go to aspecialist

Everywhere we are surrounded by techno-logical devices which have insinuated them-selves in our lives and without which wecannot do the watch the telephone the carthe television but also toothpaste X-raysvaccines birth control pills condoms sunscreen eye-glasses shavers purified andchlorinated water and so on

What I am talking about can be illustratedby comparing Mary Shelleyrsquos Frankensteinin which a creation out of human partsbecomes monstrous precisely because itentails the complete instrumentalization ofour bodies and thus a sacrilage of its allegeddivine naturalness and Donna Harawayrsquosborgs which demonstrate and theorize towhat extent we are always already synthetic(Haraway 1991) There is no nature outsidethe confines of the laboratory Resistance isfutile to the logic of technology because weare all already borg we are products of ourtechnologies and nature exists only as anArcadian fantasy This reading should not betaken to be suggesting that nature does not

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 19

exist in the sense that it is a fiction the mirageof radical social constructivism Rather thepoint is to highlight the ways in which natureis to be thought of in terms of what today wecall the lsquorecursive loopsrsquo between technologyand nature in which nature is already anlsquoartefactrsquo and lsquomachinesrsquo are natural (Hayles1999) Indeed appropriating Marxrsquos languagefrom his 1844 manuscripts we have to talkabout the humanization of machines and themechanization of humanity

Is there a moral to be extracted by theinterpenetration of humans and their techno-logical prosthesis to the point that youcannot distinguish them any longer I wouldsay that a Heideggerian response to thisquestion is anachronistic and indefensibleOn the other hand a dia-mat in the sense ofEngelsrsquos dialectical materialism will not doeither Science is neither metaphysically badnor a malleable ideological epiphenomenonAgainst these two positions I would advo-cate what has been called Kranzbergrsquos lawwhich reads ldquotechnology is neither good norbad nor is it neutralrdquo (Castells 1996 Vol 1p 65)

I would like to summarize my reflectionsby suggesting that once a phenomenology ofglobalization takes seriously the points ofdeparture discussed above we will discoverthat globalization might stand for anotheraxial period This new axial age will becharacterized by at least these four themesfirst the perpetual revolutionizing of pro-duction technologies has turned into thetechnology of innovation in such a way thatthe generation of capital is relocated to theproduction of new information technologiesand not production and processing of rawmaterials Second because of the almostinstantaneous information transmission andreception across the world and the con-vergence of natural historical and personaltemporalities we have the effect of the de-transcendentalization and temporalization oftradition These de-transcendentalizationsand temporalizations suggest that our imagesof the world will be at the reach of our owndesign In this sense we will be able to speak

of the true secularization of the world and itscomplete humanization Third is the routini-zation and de-metaphysicalization of other-ness brought about by the hyper-urbaniza-tion of humanity Otherness will become aproduct of society and in this sense we willhave to talk of regimes of alterization Thelsquootherrsquo then will become a continuouspresence that will require our constant con-cern and vigilance Fourth is the dissolutionof the boundary between natural and syn-thetic body and tool technology and natureWe will have to speak then of the age inwhich humans have become their own crea-tions and in which the directions of thereproduction of both mind and body cultureand technology will become a concern ofpolitical practice of paramount importance

The image of the world projected byglobalization is one which collapses thedifferences between biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time whatwe see is what we get To put it in thelanguage of an essay by Theodor Adorno thehistory of nature is no different from thehistory of humanity (Adorno 1984) Global-ization also projects an image of the world inwhich otherness is not external and intract-able but produced from within Finallyglobalization is an image of the world inwhich the natural and the social the createdand uncreated have been brought togetherunder the insight that we have been produc-ing ourselves as we have been producingtools to alter the world Now however theproducing of our tools is not different fromthe production of ourselves and our worldIn the image of the world projected byglobalization the world is humanity lookingat itself through its eyes and not the eyes ofa god history or nature

III City of angels

ldquoWho is the observer when it concerns thequestion about the function of religion thesystem of religion itself or science as anexternal observerrdquo (Luhmann 2000 p 118)

20 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

The kind of phenomenology of globalizationthat I sketched above allows us to ask aboutthe kinds of challenges religion faces in anage of globalization For religion appears as aresource of images concepts traditions andpractices that can allow individuals andcommunities to deal with a world that ischanging around them by the hour (Robert-son and Garrett 1991 Luhmann 2000) Inthe new Unubersichtlichkeit [unsurveyabil-ity] of our global society religion appears ascompendium of intuitions that have not beenextinguished by the so-called process ofsecularization (Mendieta forthcoming a)Most importantly however religion cannotbe dismissed or derided because it is theprivileged if not the primary form in whichthe impoverished masses of the invisiblecities of the world (those cities to which Ipointed in the first part of this essay)articulate their hopes as well as critique theirworld

The first challenge to religion that ourphenomenology of globalization allow us toarticulate has to do with the lsquode-transcenden-talizing of othernessrsquo or what I also wouldlike to call the lsquoroutinization of othernessrsquoThere is a correlation between the wayhumanity has conceptualized otherness met-aphysically and conceptually on the onehand and humanityrsquos relationship to real andconcrete otherness as it has been experiencedexistentially and phenomenologically on theother hand This correlation has been medi-ated by humanityrsquos decreasing ruralism Inother words the less rural and thus the moreurban dwelling humans have become theless other is the otherness that we can thinkof or dream up The suggestion is that themetaphysics of alterity that has guided somuch of Western theology and religiousthinking over the last 2000 years has beendetermined by a particular asymmetrybetween the country and the city For thelongest history of humanity most societieshave been farming and rural-dwelling com-munities and associations Contact betweenextremely different communities and societ-ies was sporadic and rare and when contact

did occurred this was meditated by citydwellers and the long memory of popularmythologies But as was noted above in thedawning 21st century most humans will becity dwellers Furthermore In the 21st cen-tury most humanity will be conglomerated inthe mega-urbes of the Third World Underthis circumstance the holy other the abso-lutely other will be deflated Alterity and theextraordinary what can also be called thetremendum are de-mystified and de-met-aphysicalized (Habermas 1992 Placher1996) Either everyone will be a stranger orno one will be because we will all bestrangers in a city of strangers In such asituation otherness will have become a rou-tine an un-extra-ordinary event How thenare we to think divine alterity the othernessof the holy in a situation in which onto-logically and metaphysically all alterity hasbeen deflated demoted rendered normallevelled to the cotidian Are we in a situationof having to ldquorisk a new idea of holinessrdquo asBarry Taylor Pastor at the Sanctuary Churchin Santa Monica put it This would have tobe a holiness which is not other worldly buta holiness which is about the difference anduniqueness of others those who are oureveryday other with whom we ride thesubway with whom we walk the streets ofpopulated mega-urbes of the new age withwhom we share in anonymity the crowdedspaces of the new cities The real andmetaphorical wilderness of the world of itsjungles and forests of its undiscovered con-tinents and untamed seas of its unmappeddeserts and unnavigated rivers were excusesas well instigations to go searching for godbeyond the familial the urbane the too closeand already lsquodomesticatedrsquo God was beyondthe world other than the world Now thequestion is how do we discover the other inthe mundane difference of every fellowhuman being and the crowded city ofstrangers

The second challenge has to do with thecity as locus of the culture of consumptionas the site for an ethos of immediacyhedonism and hyper-excitation Sassen

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 21

speaks of the city as the crossroads of aconfrontation between the flows of capitaland the flows of peoples One of the waysthese flows clash in cities is through theconfrontation between cultures that isbetween different modalities of life Themore people become urban dwellers themore people are exposed to the cornucopiaof cultural possibilities It is not just thatmore people are in cities it is also that morepeople are seeking to participate in thestandards of life promised by urban dwellingThe challenges are unprecedented We arepresently choking in our own refuse in ourown garbage The psychological toil mustalso be unprecedented The level of unmetexpectations unfilled desires the gapbetween universally promised but exorbi-tantly expensive commodities that shatteredself-images and worth and that are availableto a relatively small fraction of the worldpopulation has grown exponentially Thereis another underside to the city as thecrossroads of the clash of modalities of lifeThe more cities grow the more they exerttheir pull on the so-called hinterland therural areas The more agriculture is mecha-nized and industrialized the more we adoptbiotechnology the more superfluous ldquofarm-ersrdquo become At the same time the expansionof telecommunications television and paidfor television and satellite connections havemade it easier to link up and peer into theldquotube of plentyrdquo to use that wonderfulphrase by Erik Barnouw (1990 [1975]) Thecity literally and metaphorically consumes itshinterland its outlying areas of supply itconsumes its resources and produce but alsoits cultures and its peoples

It is perhaps unnecessary to underscoreagain that most of the consumption of ruralresources is taking place in the metropolisesof the so-called First World So not onlymust we address the rampant and rapaciousconsumerism of cities in general but also theparticularly scandalous and grotesque asym-metry between the consumption of FirstWorld cities and Third World cities Thisissue becomes particularly pressing when in

the so-called advanced nations of the worldwe have thinkers intellectuals and criticstalking about a politics and culture of inclu-sion and tolerance (Habermas 1998) Thispolitics of inclusion is articulated with thebest intentions in mind The assumptionguiding it is that people throughout theworld would be better if they could partici-pate more equitably in the same kinds of so-called basic needs and luxuries that wewesterners enjoy But there is somethingprofoundly disingenuous and deleteriouslynaotildeve about such a view In some cases thepoverty of those across the world to whomwe would like to extend our standard ofliving is due precisely to our luxury Thatwhich we want to share is the cause of theprivation we want to alleviate Thus perhapsthe agenda should not be one of inclusionbut of dismantling the system that occa-sioned in the first place the exclusions webenefited and continue to benefit from

In this situation then the challengebecomes how to think of an urban culture offrugality The challenge is how to translatethe religious message and teaching of povertyas a holy way as a holy calling into a secularvalue a secular calling Another way ofputting it would be how do we translate thevisions of the desert fathers St Francis ofAssisi Mohandas Gandhi into an urbanvision for a spiritually starving youth Oralternatively if we think of what ArnoldToynbee and Eric Hobsbawn said about the20th century namely that its greatestachievement was the expansion of the middleclass then the goal for the 21st centuryshould be the expansion of a globalizedldquoliving level classrdquo In other words we haveto develop a culture for which the greatestachievement is not that everyone else will livelike us but that we will live at the level thatallows the most people to share in the mostfundamental goods potable water clean airinfant nutrition to sustain healthy standardsof unstunted growth and the possibility ofbasic education Here I would have to saythat I concur with Hardt and Negri on theircanonization of Assisi as a saint in the

22 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

hagiography of revolutionary militancy(2000 p 413)

The third challenge that our phenomenol-ogy of globalization allows us to elucidate hasto do with one of its central locus of analysisnamely the city If cities have become the siteswhere the unbundling of the state takes placethat is if we take cities to be the sites for thede-nationalizing of the national and if we atthe same time take the city as the locus of anemergent juridification or process of legal-ization of new forms of relationships then arewe not in need of having to re-think therelationship between the legal and politicalstructures of the emergent supra-nationalstate and the para- or extra-statist ldquochurchrdquoAnother way of putting it would be to notethat the church at least in the West antecedesthe modern nation-state In fact the churchwas the state and that partly because of thisthe quest for modernity the process ofmodernization entailed a secularization ofstate and legal structures In the process thechurchrsquos sphere of operation becamerestricted or constrained by the spaces drawnby the boundaries of nation-states Churchesand denominations became identified withnational boundaries which took place not-withstanding the underlying and fundamentaluniversalist thrust of Christianity If weaccept Sassenrsquos analysis which we must giventhe overwhelming evidence then we areinescapably put in the situation of having tore-think the relationship between the churchand the state In fact as the nation-states of the19th and 20th century are unbundled andnew forms of political and legal rights emergein de-territorialized and de-nationalizedforms of political self-determination then thechurch itself will have to face its de-national-ization and de-territorialization At the sametime however one of the fundamental condi-tions of the presence of the church in the 21stcentury will have to be that it must havelearned the lessons of the last 500 years ofcolonialism imperialism and post-colonial-ism This means that the challenge is dual Onthe one hand the new church must find aplace beyond the nation-states of political

modernity but on the other hand it must doso with a post-colonialist and post-imperialistattitude In the age of global transformationsthe new church cannot and will not be able toserve as an agent of globalization for the newimperial masters that began to profile them-selves in the horizon namely a united front ofEuropean nations (an expanded NATO) atechnological elite bent on re-designingnature and a cosmopolitan nobility withoutcontrols allegiances or consciences

Fourth and finally I think that anotherextremely important challenge has to do withthe insight that cities are the places wherecultures come to cultivate each other Inother words cities are the places where oldcultures are cannibalized but also carniv-alized where old cultures which are dyingcome to be renewed but also where newcultures are produced from the remains ofold ones (Hamacher 1997) Cities are germi-nals of new cultures Indeed just as we arevery likely to find micro-climates in mostglobal cities we are likely to find culturalenclaves little Italys Chinatowns Japan-towns little Bombays etc These places arewhere the centripetal and centrifugal forcesof homogenization and heterogenizationinteract to produce new cultural formationsUnderlying this new cultural genesis is itsevident and almost presentist character Theprocesses of cultural genesis take place rightin front of our eyes Cultures are notmillennial sedimentations and even thatwhich is peddled as the oldest is a present-day version of the old Most importantlycultures have become something we produceand choose cultures are something which weeither nurture and preserve or abandon anddisavow In all of these cases we are notpassive but active agents of transformationIn this situation the challenge for the newchurch for an urban ministry for the 21stcentury is how to develop an ecclesiology ofcultural diversity How will the new churchparticipate in this cultural genesis that isgerminating in global cities while retaining asense of identity Or conversely how will itretain a sense of cultural identity without

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 23

becoming either ethnocentric or jingoisticabout its cultural bequest without contribut-ing to the ossification of its own culture Onwhat terms can the new church participate inthe creation of new cultures and the preser-vation of successful ones

Conclusion

Cities are the vortex of the convergence ofthe processes of globalization and local-ization Cities are epitomes of glocalizationto use Robertsonrsquos language (1994) They arealso sites of the sedimentation of history Inthis essay I have sough to advance theresearch agenda that would take the ldquoinvisi-ble citiesrdquo of the so-called Third World astheir primary object of analysis At the sametime however I have urged that we look atthe cities in the developed industrializedworld through the eyes of their invisibleinhabitants and citizens immigrants ethnicminorities disenfranchised groups workerswomen and the youth There are invisiblecities within the cities that are so visible inmost urban theory and analysis as well asinvisible cities that remain unseen becausethey are not on the horizon of the academicagendas of researchers in the universities ofthe developed world

In tandem I have suspended judgementon whether to be for or against global-ization not because I do not think that wecan make moral judgments in this case butbecause I think we need to broaden ouranalyses of this new order of things Ideveloped some general points of departurefor a phenomenological analysis of global-ization This particular approach I thinkexhibits how ldquoglobalizationrdquo can and oughtto become a matter for serious philosophicalreflection I have identified the issues ofalterity temporality tradition the distinc-tion between the natural and the syntheticas philosophemes that are substantivelyimpacted by the processes of globalizationYet the phenomenological approach Iarticulate is deliberate in assuming a partic-

ular perspective or angle of approach I havesought to delineate a phenomenology ofglobalization from below The world doesnot disclose itself in the same way to allsubjects much less globalization Thus thephenomenology here presented urges us tolook at the world from below from theperspective of those who seem to be moreadversely than beneficially affected by theprocesses that make up globalization

This is what the ldquobelowrdquo in the subtitle ofthe essay pointed to the below of the poorand destitute the below of those who are notseen and do not register in the radar of socialtheory Furthermore I have tried to furtherqualify that perspective from below byfocusing my attention on the issue of reli-gion Religion clearly can mean manythings but at the very least it means ldquothe sighof the oppressedrdquo and the ldquoencyclopediccompendiumrdquo of a heartless world as Marxput it (1994 p 28) if only because it is theform in which the destitute the most vulner-able in our world express their critiques aswell as hopes I have argued that we ought tolook at cities as germinals of new culturesand that if we want to trace the emergentcultures of those ldquobelowrdquo then we betterlook at religious movements In what waysare the religious language of the oppressedand disenfranchised of the invisible cities ofglobalization critiques and resistances toglobalization This is clearly a researchdesideratum rather than a description oreven assessment

Note

1 I want to thank Bob Catterall for encouraging me towrite this article and for his comments on earlyversions of it I also want to thank Lois AnnLorentzen and Nelson Maldonado Torres who readit with great care and made substantive suggestionscorrections and criticisms that have made meunderstand better my own project I also want tothank Enrique Dussel Jurgen Habermas WalterMignolo and Santiago Castro-Gomez with whom Ihave discussed many of the ideas here developedand who have given me impetus to continue alongthis line with their own pioneering works

24 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Bibliography

Adorno TW (1984) lsquoThe idea of natural historyrsquo Telos60 pp 31ndash42

Amin S (1996) Capitalism in the Age of GlobalizationThe Management of Contemporary Society Londonand New York Zed Books

Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large CulturalDimensions of Globalization MinneapolisUniversity of Minnesota Press

Appiah KA (1992) In My Fatherrsquos House Africa in thePhilosophy of Culture New York Oxford UniversityPress

Aronowitz S (2000) The Knowledge FactoryDismantling the Corporate University and CreatingTrue Higher Learning Boston Beacon Press

Barber BR (1995) Jihad vs McWorld How Globalismand Tribalism are Reshaping the World New YorkBallantine Books

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1993) lsquoA globalizingeconomy some implications and consequencesrsquo inB Mazlish and R Buultjens (eds) ConceptualizingGlobal History pp 153ndash172 Boulder COWestview Press

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1994) Global DreamsImperial Corporations and the New World OrderNew York Simon amp Schuster

Barnouw E (1990 [1975]) Tube of Plenty TheEvolution of American Television New YorkOxford University Press

Baudrillard J (1981) For a Critique of the PoliticalEconomy of the Sign St Louis MO Telos Press

Bauman Z (1998a) Globalization The HumanConsequences New York Columbia UniversityPress

Bauman Z (1998b) lsquoPostmodern religionrsquo in P Heelas(ed) Religion Modernity and PostmodernityCambridge Blackwell

Beck U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung Frankfurt amMain Suhrkamp

Bell D (1976) The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism New York Basic Books

Benford G (1999) Deep Time How HumanityCommunicates Across Millenia New York AvonBooks Inc

Beyer P (1994) Religion and Globalization LondonSage

Brahm Jr G and Driscoll M (eds) (1995) ProstheticTerritories Politics and Hypertechnologies BoulderCO Westview

Bretherton C and Ponton G (eds) (1996) GlobalPolitics An Introduction Cambridge Blackwell

Calvino I (1974) Invisible Cities New York HarcourtBrace Jovanovich

Casanova J (1994) Public Religions in the ModernWorld Chicago University of Chicago Press

Castells M (1996ndash8) The Information Age EconomySociety and Culture Vol 1 The Rise of the

Network Society Vol 2 The Power of Identity Vol3 End of Millenium Malden MA and OxfordBlackwell Publishers

Chaunu P (1974) Historie science sociale la dureelrsquoespace et lrsquohomme a lrsquoepoque moderne ParisSociete drsquoedition drsquoenseignement superieur

Clark RP (1997) The Global Imperative AnInterpretative History of the Spread of HumankindBoulder CO Westview Press

Costello P (1993) World Historians and Their GoalsTwentieth-century Answers to Modernism DeKalbNorthern Illinois University Press

Dawkins K (1997) Gene Wars The Politics ofBiotechnology New York Seven Stories Press

de Benoist A (1996) lsquoConfronting globalizationrsquo Telos108 pp 117ndash137

Dussel E (1998) Etica de la Liberacion en la edad deglobalizacion y de la exclusion Madrid EditorialTrotta

Elias N (1992) Time An Essay Cambridge MA BasilBlackwell

Featherstone M (1995) Undoing CultureGlobalization Postmodernism and Identity LondonSage Publications

Fritsche J (1999) Historical Destiny and NationalSocialism in Heideggerrsquos Being and Time Berkeleyand Los Angeles University of California Press

Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of SocietyCambridge Polity Press

Giddens A (1987) Social Theory and ModernSociology Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of ModernityCambridge Polity Press

Gray J (1998) False Dawn The Delusions of GlobalCapitalism London Granta Books

Grossberg L (1999) lsquoSpeculations and articulations ofglobalizationrsquo Polygraph 11 pp 11ndash48

Habermas J (1992) Postmetaphysical ThinkingPhilosophical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (1998) The Inclusion of the Other Studiesin Political Theory Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (2001) The Postnational ConstellationPolitical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Hall Sir Peter (1998) Cities in Civilization New YorkPantheon Books

Hamacher W (1997) lsquoOne 2 many multiculturalismsrsquoin H de Vries and S Weber (eds) ViolenceIdentity and Self-determination Stanford CAStanford University Press

Haraway D (1991) Simians Cyborgs and WomenThe Reinvention of Nature New York Routledge

Hardt M and Negri A (2000) Empire CambridgeMA Harvard University Press

Harvey D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity AnEnquiry into the Origins of Cultural ChangeCambridge MA Basil Blackwell

Hayles NK (1999) How we Became PosthumanVirtual Bodies in Cybernetics Literature and

16 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

enter into conflict across a transnationalurban system

Habermas has noted with acuity that oneof the characteristics of the 18th and 19thcenturies was their pronounced fears of theldquomassrdquo ldquothe crowdrdquo (Habermas 2001 p39) Such fears were summarized in the titleof the prescient work by Ortega y GassetThe Revolt of the Masses (1985) As wasnoted already the 18th and the 19th centuriessignalled the reversal of the relationshipbetween countryside and city This reversalmeant the rapid urbanization and demo-graphic explosion in cities which accompanythe rapid industrialization of certain metro-polises of the West London Berlin NewYork Chicago Newark Mexico City PortoAlegre and the non-West New DehliTokyo Beijing Cairo etc Urbanization andIndustrialization gave rise to the spectre ofthe irascible insatiable uncontrollable massthat would raze everything in its path Threeclassical responses emerged Sorel and thecelebration of the creative power of anar-chical and explosive unorganized mass mobi-lization the Marxist-Leninist and theattempt to domesticate and train the creativeand transformative power of social unrestthrough the development of a party machin-ery that would guide the ire and discontentof gathered masses of unemployed andemployed workers and the conservative andreactionary response of an Edmund Burkebut which is also echoed in the works ofphilosophers like Heidegger which dis-dained and vilified the common folk themass in a simple term Das Man The crowdthe mass is consumed and distracted byprattle and curiosity as it wallows in themiasma of inauthenticity and cowardness(Fritsche 1999)

Today such attitudes seem not just foreignbut also unrealistic Most of our experience isdetermined by a continuous mingling withcrowds and large undifferentiated masses ofpeople We get on the road and we areconfronted with traffic jams we get on thesubway and people accost and touch us fromall directions We live in continuous friction

with the stranger the other May we suggestthat the ldquoOtherrdquo has become such an impor-tant point of departure for philosophicalreflection precisely because we exist in such acontinuous propinquity with it Indeed theOther is no longer simply a phantasmagor-ical presence projected and barely discern-ible beyond the boundaries of the ecumenethe polis and the frontiers of the nation-stateAt the same time the discourse about theldquootherrdquo what is called the politics of alteritymarks a shift from the negative discourse ofanxiety and fear epitomized in the termldquoanomierdquo so well diagnosed by DurkheimSimmel and Freud and so aptly described byChristopher Lasch (1979) to the positivediscourse of solidarity inclusion acceptancetolerance citizenship and justice so welldiagnosed and described by Zymunt Bauman(1998b) Ulrich Beck (1997) Anthony Gid-dens (1990) and Jurgen Habermas (2001)

Are there any morals to be extracted fromthis profound transformation in the wayhumanity in general understands itself Forthe longest period of the history of human-kind groups remained both sheltered fromand inured to otherness by the solidity andstability of their traditions and their worldsCultures remained fairly segregated maps ofthe world in which the foreign strange andunknown was relegated beyond the bound-aries of the controllable and surveyable Tothis extent lsquoothernessrsquo was legislated over byreligion the state nature and even historynamely those centres of gravity of cultureand images of the world In an age in whichall traditions are under constant revision andhuman temporality converges with the age ofthe world itself then lsquoothernessrsquo appearsbefore us as naked unmediated otherness weare all others before each other In otherwords neither our sense of identity nor thesense of difference of the other are given apriori they are always discovered consti-tuted and dismantled in the very processes ofencounter The other was always constitutedfor us by extrinsic forces Now the other isconstituted in the very process of our iden-tity formation but in a contingent fashion

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 17

We make others as we make ourselves Thisreflection links up with some insights thatEnrique Dussel has had with respect to therelationship between the emergence of citiesand the development of the first codes ofethics the Hammurabi Code and the BookN of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Dussel1998) Such codes arose precisely becauseindividuals were thrown into the proximityof each other and were thus confronted witheach otherrsquos vulnerability and injurabilityThe injuction to take care of the poor theindigent the orphan the widow the invalidcould only arise out of the urban experienceof the contiguity with the injurable flesh ofthe stranger Today the experience of theindigent other is of the immigrant the exiledthe refugee who build their enclaves in theshadows of the glamorous city of transna-tional capital (King 1990 Sassen 1999) Forthis reason the other and the immigrant areinterchangeable but this also raises the issueof the new global city as a space for therepresentation and formation of post-colo-nial identities Geo-cities are spaces for thereconfiguration of image the imaginationand the imaginary as Arjun Appaduraiargued (1996) In this sense the centrality ofthe urban experience for humanity meansthat otherness is not going to be a meremetaphysical or even phenomenological cat-egory and concern Under the reign of thecity Otherness has become quotidian andpractical

Fourth another fundamental point ofdeparture for a phenomenology of global-ization will have to be the analysis of theplace of technology in our everyday lives Iwould like to understand technology in twosenses First in its broadest sense as ldquothe useof scientific knowledge to specify ways ofdoing things in a reproducible wayrdquo (Bell1976 p 29) Second as a prosthesis of thehuman body Technology to paraphrase awonderful aphorism of William Burroughsis the mind wanting more body I will discussfirst the former sense of technology as ascientific specification for the iterable way ofdoing things In this sense then a hospital is

a social technology like agriculture and cattleraising are material technologies By the sametoken prisons asylums and ghettos are socialtechnologies There is however somethingunique about technology in the 20th centuryand that is that technology itself has becomean object of technology in other words theuse of science in order to produce ever moreefficient ways of doing things in ever morereproducible ways itself has become a tech-nological quest This technology of technol-ogy is what one might call the institutional-ization of invention Alfred NorthWhitehead noted that ldquothe greatest inventionof the 19th century was the invention of themethod of inventionrdquo (Whitehead 1925 p141) What Whitehead attributes to the 19thcentury reached its true apogee in the secondhalf of the 20th century with the institu-tionalization of the research universityWhile the programme of the research uni-versity goes back to the German ideal of theuniversity it is in the USA that this ideagained its highest formalization and statesupport Without question we have to attrib-ute the greatest technological breakthroughsof the 20th century to this unique con-vergence of the state the military and theresearch university what Eisenhower calledthe militaryndashindustrial complex and whatwe now with hindsight should more appro-priately call the militaryndashuniversityndashindus-trial complex (Kenney 1986 Aronowitz2000)

The rise of the nation-state also signifiedthe rise of state-sponsored education and thestate university The university plays a dualrole On the one hand it has the function ofpreparing citizens and workers for the mate-rial and cultural-political self-reproductionof society On the other it has the role ofinstitutionalizing scientific investigation theinvention of invention Through the uni-versity the state invests in its future ability totransform its material technologies of self-reproduction Winning Nobel prizes is notjust a matter of pride it is above all aquestion of institutional power to supportimmense research budgets whose actual

18 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

industrial and technical application might befar off into the future This is one of thereasons why the USA has remained a worldpower despite its apparent military stale-mate namely because it still remains thecentre for the production of most techno-logical innovation

Related to the invention of invention whatI called the institutionalization of the tech-nology of technology as its other side is theinterpenetration of technology in everyaspect of our lives Even those who are notdirectly affected by technological revolutionsin their daily life are nonetheless indirectlyaffected insofar as their worlds economiesand cultures are made vulnerable to take-overs and colonization by those who drivethe technological revolutions of today Forthe longest period of the history of humanitytechnology remained distant from the livesand bodies of men and women not because itdid not impact them but because it did sosporadically and in such tangential ways firethe wheel the printing press the metalplough the steam engine the automobileEach technological innovation however hasmeant a further interpenetration betweentool and human body With this I turn to thediscussion of technology as prosthesis thesecond sense of technology I want to con-sider in light of a phenomenology ofglobalization

A technology is a way of doing things inways that can be reproduced again andagain and that therefore can be taught andpassed on Culture is in this sense the mostcomplex and important technology of all Inthis sense a technology is a way for asociety to extend itself across time fromgeneration to generation century to century(Giddens 1984 1987) A technology gen-erally instantiated itself in tools Tools allowparticular individuals to reach beyond theboundaries of their own bodies A tool is anextension of a particular bodily organ thataugments its original performance Tool andbody however have remained relatively dis-tinct even if one can claim that the hand isa product of our invention of tools

(Rothenberg 1993) Recognition of the dis-tinctness between tool and body does notentail the negation of their dialectical inter-dependence and co-modification Their dis-tinctness was sustained by what I havealready referred to above as the temporalityof humans and the time of the world Whenthe time of humans and the world convergewhat mediates their encounter tools hasalready fused with the body or has alreadymade the world immediate Our experienceof the world is already so mediated by ourtechnological tools that we cannot distin-guish the world from the tool and thesefrom the body We are our tools We are ourtechnological prosthesis because they arethe world (Brahm and Driscoll 1995) Butthis does not mean that technology is itselftransparent Rather technology itself hasbecome like our bodies in the sense that wedo not know how our livers hearts orbrains work we just assume that they willdo what they were designed to do and ifthey break down then we go to aspecialist

Everywhere we are surrounded by techno-logical devices which have insinuated them-selves in our lives and without which wecannot do the watch the telephone the carthe television but also toothpaste X-raysvaccines birth control pills condoms sunscreen eye-glasses shavers purified andchlorinated water and so on

What I am talking about can be illustratedby comparing Mary Shelleyrsquos Frankensteinin which a creation out of human partsbecomes monstrous precisely because itentails the complete instrumentalization ofour bodies and thus a sacrilage of its allegeddivine naturalness and Donna Harawayrsquosborgs which demonstrate and theorize towhat extent we are always already synthetic(Haraway 1991) There is no nature outsidethe confines of the laboratory Resistance isfutile to the logic of technology because weare all already borg we are products of ourtechnologies and nature exists only as anArcadian fantasy This reading should not betaken to be suggesting that nature does not

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 19

exist in the sense that it is a fiction the mirageof radical social constructivism Rather thepoint is to highlight the ways in which natureis to be thought of in terms of what today wecall the lsquorecursive loopsrsquo between technologyand nature in which nature is already anlsquoartefactrsquo and lsquomachinesrsquo are natural (Hayles1999) Indeed appropriating Marxrsquos languagefrom his 1844 manuscripts we have to talkabout the humanization of machines and themechanization of humanity

Is there a moral to be extracted by theinterpenetration of humans and their techno-logical prosthesis to the point that youcannot distinguish them any longer I wouldsay that a Heideggerian response to thisquestion is anachronistic and indefensibleOn the other hand a dia-mat in the sense ofEngelsrsquos dialectical materialism will not doeither Science is neither metaphysically badnor a malleable ideological epiphenomenonAgainst these two positions I would advo-cate what has been called Kranzbergrsquos lawwhich reads ldquotechnology is neither good norbad nor is it neutralrdquo (Castells 1996 Vol 1p 65)

I would like to summarize my reflectionsby suggesting that once a phenomenology ofglobalization takes seriously the points ofdeparture discussed above we will discoverthat globalization might stand for anotheraxial period This new axial age will becharacterized by at least these four themesfirst the perpetual revolutionizing of pro-duction technologies has turned into thetechnology of innovation in such a way thatthe generation of capital is relocated to theproduction of new information technologiesand not production and processing of rawmaterials Second because of the almostinstantaneous information transmission andreception across the world and the con-vergence of natural historical and personaltemporalities we have the effect of the de-transcendentalization and temporalization oftradition These de-transcendentalizationsand temporalizations suggest that our imagesof the world will be at the reach of our owndesign In this sense we will be able to speak

of the true secularization of the world and itscomplete humanization Third is the routini-zation and de-metaphysicalization of other-ness brought about by the hyper-urbaniza-tion of humanity Otherness will become aproduct of society and in this sense we willhave to talk of regimes of alterization Thelsquootherrsquo then will become a continuouspresence that will require our constant con-cern and vigilance Fourth is the dissolutionof the boundary between natural and syn-thetic body and tool technology and natureWe will have to speak then of the age inwhich humans have become their own crea-tions and in which the directions of thereproduction of both mind and body cultureand technology will become a concern ofpolitical practice of paramount importance

The image of the world projected byglobalization is one which collapses thedifferences between biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time whatwe see is what we get To put it in thelanguage of an essay by Theodor Adorno thehistory of nature is no different from thehistory of humanity (Adorno 1984) Global-ization also projects an image of the world inwhich otherness is not external and intract-able but produced from within Finallyglobalization is an image of the world inwhich the natural and the social the createdand uncreated have been brought togetherunder the insight that we have been produc-ing ourselves as we have been producingtools to alter the world Now however theproducing of our tools is not different fromthe production of ourselves and our worldIn the image of the world projected byglobalization the world is humanity lookingat itself through its eyes and not the eyes ofa god history or nature

III City of angels

ldquoWho is the observer when it concerns thequestion about the function of religion thesystem of religion itself or science as anexternal observerrdquo (Luhmann 2000 p 118)

20 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

The kind of phenomenology of globalizationthat I sketched above allows us to ask aboutthe kinds of challenges religion faces in anage of globalization For religion appears as aresource of images concepts traditions andpractices that can allow individuals andcommunities to deal with a world that ischanging around them by the hour (Robert-son and Garrett 1991 Luhmann 2000) Inthe new Unubersichtlichkeit [unsurveyabil-ity] of our global society religion appears ascompendium of intuitions that have not beenextinguished by the so-called process ofsecularization (Mendieta forthcoming a)Most importantly however religion cannotbe dismissed or derided because it is theprivileged if not the primary form in whichthe impoverished masses of the invisiblecities of the world (those cities to which Ipointed in the first part of this essay)articulate their hopes as well as critique theirworld

The first challenge to religion that ourphenomenology of globalization allow us toarticulate has to do with the lsquode-transcenden-talizing of othernessrsquo or what I also wouldlike to call the lsquoroutinization of othernessrsquoThere is a correlation between the wayhumanity has conceptualized otherness met-aphysically and conceptually on the onehand and humanityrsquos relationship to real andconcrete otherness as it has been experiencedexistentially and phenomenologically on theother hand This correlation has been medi-ated by humanityrsquos decreasing ruralism Inother words the less rural and thus the moreurban dwelling humans have become theless other is the otherness that we can thinkof or dream up The suggestion is that themetaphysics of alterity that has guided somuch of Western theology and religiousthinking over the last 2000 years has beendetermined by a particular asymmetrybetween the country and the city For thelongest history of humanity most societieshave been farming and rural-dwelling com-munities and associations Contact betweenextremely different communities and societ-ies was sporadic and rare and when contact

did occurred this was meditated by citydwellers and the long memory of popularmythologies But as was noted above in thedawning 21st century most humans will becity dwellers Furthermore In the 21st cen-tury most humanity will be conglomerated inthe mega-urbes of the Third World Underthis circumstance the holy other the abso-lutely other will be deflated Alterity and theextraordinary what can also be called thetremendum are de-mystified and de-met-aphysicalized (Habermas 1992 Placher1996) Either everyone will be a stranger orno one will be because we will all bestrangers in a city of strangers In such asituation otherness will have become a rou-tine an un-extra-ordinary event How thenare we to think divine alterity the othernessof the holy in a situation in which onto-logically and metaphysically all alterity hasbeen deflated demoted rendered normallevelled to the cotidian Are we in a situationof having to ldquorisk a new idea of holinessrdquo asBarry Taylor Pastor at the Sanctuary Churchin Santa Monica put it This would have tobe a holiness which is not other worldly buta holiness which is about the difference anduniqueness of others those who are oureveryday other with whom we ride thesubway with whom we walk the streets ofpopulated mega-urbes of the new age withwhom we share in anonymity the crowdedspaces of the new cities The real andmetaphorical wilderness of the world of itsjungles and forests of its undiscovered con-tinents and untamed seas of its unmappeddeserts and unnavigated rivers were excusesas well instigations to go searching for godbeyond the familial the urbane the too closeand already lsquodomesticatedrsquo God was beyondthe world other than the world Now thequestion is how do we discover the other inthe mundane difference of every fellowhuman being and the crowded city ofstrangers

The second challenge has to do with thecity as locus of the culture of consumptionas the site for an ethos of immediacyhedonism and hyper-excitation Sassen

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 21

speaks of the city as the crossroads of aconfrontation between the flows of capitaland the flows of peoples One of the waysthese flows clash in cities is through theconfrontation between cultures that isbetween different modalities of life Themore people become urban dwellers themore people are exposed to the cornucopiaof cultural possibilities It is not just thatmore people are in cities it is also that morepeople are seeking to participate in thestandards of life promised by urban dwellingThe challenges are unprecedented We arepresently choking in our own refuse in ourown garbage The psychological toil mustalso be unprecedented The level of unmetexpectations unfilled desires the gapbetween universally promised but exorbi-tantly expensive commodities that shatteredself-images and worth and that are availableto a relatively small fraction of the worldpopulation has grown exponentially Thereis another underside to the city as thecrossroads of the clash of modalities of lifeThe more cities grow the more they exerttheir pull on the so-called hinterland therural areas The more agriculture is mecha-nized and industrialized the more we adoptbiotechnology the more superfluous ldquofarm-ersrdquo become At the same time the expansionof telecommunications television and paidfor television and satellite connections havemade it easier to link up and peer into theldquotube of plentyrdquo to use that wonderfulphrase by Erik Barnouw (1990 [1975]) Thecity literally and metaphorically consumes itshinterland its outlying areas of supply itconsumes its resources and produce but alsoits cultures and its peoples

It is perhaps unnecessary to underscoreagain that most of the consumption of ruralresources is taking place in the metropolisesof the so-called First World So not onlymust we address the rampant and rapaciousconsumerism of cities in general but also theparticularly scandalous and grotesque asym-metry between the consumption of FirstWorld cities and Third World cities Thisissue becomes particularly pressing when in

the so-called advanced nations of the worldwe have thinkers intellectuals and criticstalking about a politics and culture of inclu-sion and tolerance (Habermas 1998) Thispolitics of inclusion is articulated with thebest intentions in mind The assumptionguiding it is that people throughout theworld would be better if they could partici-pate more equitably in the same kinds of so-called basic needs and luxuries that wewesterners enjoy But there is somethingprofoundly disingenuous and deleteriouslynaotildeve about such a view In some cases thepoverty of those across the world to whomwe would like to extend our standard ofliving is due precisely to our luxury Thatwhich we want to share is the cause of theprivation we want to alleviate Thus perhapsthe agenda should not be one of inclusionbut of dismantling the system that occa-sioned in the first place the exclusions webenefited and continue to benefit from

In this situation then the challengebecomes how to think of an urban culture offrugality The challenge is how to translatethe religious message and teaching of povertyas a holy way as a holy calling into a secularvalue a secular calling Another way ofputting it would be how do we translate thevisions of the desert fathers St Francis ofAssisi Mohandas Gandhi into an urbanvision for a spiritually starving youth Oralternatively if we think of what ArnoldToynbee and Eric Hobsbawn said about the20th century namely that its greatestachievement was the expansion of the middleclass then the goal for the 21st centuryshould be the expansion of a globalizedldquoliving level classrdquo In other words we haveto develop a culture for which the greatestachievement is not that everyone else will livelike us but that we will live at the level thatallows the most people to share in the mostfundamental goods potable water clean airinfant nutrition to sustain healthy standardsof unstunted growth and the possibility ofbasic education Here I would have to saythat I concur with Hardt and Negri on theircanonization of Assisi as a saint in the

22 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

hagiography of revolutionary militancy(2000 p 413)

The third challenge that our phenomenol-ogy of globalization allows us to elucidate hasto do with one of its central locus of analysisnamely the city If cities have become the siteswhere the unbundling of the state takes placethat is if we take cities to be the sites for thede-nationalizing of the national and if we atthe same time take the city as the locus of anemergent juridification or process of legal-ization of new forms of relationships then arewe not in need of having to re-think therelationship between the legal and politicalstructures of the emergent supra-nationalstate and the para- or extra-statist ldquochurchrdquoAnother way of putting it would be to notethat the church at least in the West antecedesthe modern nation-state In fact the churchwas the state and that partly because of thisthe quest for modernity the process ofmodernization entailed a secularization ofstate and legal structures In the process thechurchrsquos sphere of operation becamerestricted or constrained by the spaces drawnby the boundaries of nation-states Churchesand denominations became identified withnational boundaries which took place not-withstanding the underlying and fundamentaluniversalist thrust of Christianity If weaccept Sassenrsquos analysis which we must giventhe overwhelming evidence then we areinescapably put in the situation of having tore-think the relationship between the churchand the state In fact as the nation-states of the19th and 20th century are unbundled andnew forms of political and legal rights emergein de-territorialized and de-nationalizedforms of political self-determination then thechurch itself will have to face its de-national-ization and de-territorialization At the sametime however one of the fundamental condi-tions of the presence of the church in the 21stcentury will have to be that it must havelearned the lessons of the last 500 years ofcolonialism imperialism and post-colonial-ism This means that the challenge is dual Onthe one hand the new church must find aplace beyond the nation-states of political

modernity but on the other hand it must doso with a post-colonialist and post-imperialistattitude In the age of global transformationsthe new church cannot and will not be able toserve as an agent of globalization for the newimperial masters that began to profile them-selves in the horizon namely a united front ofEuropean nations (an expanded NATO) atechnological elite bent on re-designingnature and a cosmopolitan nobility withoutcontrols allegiances or consciences

Fourth and finally I think that anotherextremely important challenge has to do withthe insight that cities are the places wherecultures come to cultivate each other Inother words cities are the places where oldcultures are cannibalized but also carniv-alized where old cultures which are dyingcome to be renewed but also where newcultures are produced from the remains ofold ones (Hamacher 1997) Cities are germi-nals of new cultures Indeed just as we arevery likely to find micro-climates in mostglobal cities we are likely to find culturalenclaves little Italys Chinatowns Japan-towns little Bombays etc These places arewhere the centripetal and centrifugal forcesof homogenization and heterogenizationinteract to produce new cultural formationsUnderlying this new cultural genesis is itsevident and almost presentist character Theprocesses of cultural genesis take place rightin front of our eyes Cultures are notmillennial sedimentations and even thatwhich is peddled as the oldest is a present-day version of the old Most importantlycultures have become something we produceand choose cultures are something which weeither nurture and preserve or abandon anddisavow In all of these cases we are notpassive but active agents of transformationIn this situation the challenge for the newchurch for an urban ministry for the 21stcentury is how to develop an ecclesiology ofcultural diversity How will the new churchparticipate in this cultural genesis that isgerminating in global cities while retaining asense of identity Or conversely how will itretain a sense of cultural identity without

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 23

becoming either ethnocentric or jingoisticabout its cultural bequest without contribut-ing to the ossification of its own culture Onwhat terms can the new church participate inthe creation of new cultures and the preser-vation of successful ones

Conclusion

Cities are the vortex of the convergence ofthe processes of globalization and local-ization Cities are epitomes of glocalizationto use Robertsonrsquos language (1994) They arealso sites of the sedimentation of history Inthis essay I have sough to advance theresearch agenda that would take the ldquoinvisi-ble citiesrdquo of the so-called Third World astheir primary object of analysis At the sametime however I have urged that we look atthe cities in the developed industrializedworld through the eyes of their invisibleinhabitants and citizens immigrants ethnicminorities disenfranchised groups workerswomen and the youth There are invisiblecities within the cities that are so visible inmost urban theory and analysis as well asinvisible cities that remain unseen becausethey are not on the horizon of the academicagendas of researchers in the universities ofthe developed world

In tandem I have suspended judgementon whether to be for or against global-ization not because I do not think that wecan make moral judgments in this case butbecause I think we need to broaden ouranalyses of this new order of things Ideveloped some general points of departurefor a phenomenological analysis of global-ization This particular approach I thinkexhibits how ldquoglobalizationrdquo can and oughtto become a matter for serious philosophicalreflection I have identified the issues ofalterity temporality tradition the distinc-tion between the natural and the syntheticas philosophemes that are substantivelyimpacted by the processes of globalizationYet the phenomenological approach Iarticulate is deliberate in assuming a partic-

ular perspective or angle of approach I havesought to delineate a phenomenology ofglobalization from below The world doesnot disclose itself in the same way to allsubjects much less globalization Thus thephenomenology here presented urges us tolook at the world from below from theperspective of those who seem to be moreadversely than beneficially affected by theprocesses that make up globalization

This is what the ldquobelowrdquo in the subtitle ofthe essay pointed to the below of the poorand destitute the below of those who are notseen and do not register in the radar of socialtheory Furthermore I have tried to furtherqualify that perspective from below byfocusing my attention on the issue of reli-gion Religion clearly can mean manythings but at the very least it means ldquothe sighof the oppressedrdquo and the ldquoencyclopediccompendiumrdquo of a heartless world as Marxput it (1994 p 28) if only because it is theform in which the destitute the most vulner-able in our world express their critiques aswell as hopes I have argued that we ought tolook at cities as germinals of new culturesand that if we want to trace the emergentcultures of those ldquobelowrdquo then we betterlook at religious movements In what waysare the religious language of the oppressedand disenfranchised of the invisible cities ofglobalization critiques and resistances toglobalization This is clearly a researchdesideratum rather than a description oreven assessment

Note

1 I want to thank Bob Catterall for encouraging me towrite this article and for his comments on earlyversions of it I also want to thank Lois AnnLorentzen and Nelson Maldonado Torres who readit with great care and made substantive suggestionscorrections and criticisms that have made meunderstand better my own project I also want tothank Enrique Dussel Jurgen Habermas WalterMignolo and Santiago Castro-Gomez with whom Ihave discussed many of the ideas here developedand who have given me impetus to continue alongthis line with their own pioneering works

24 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Bibliography

Adorno TW (1984) lsquoThe idea of natural historyrsquo Telos60 pp 31ndash42

Amin S (1996) Capitalism in the Age of GlobalizationThe Management of Contemporary Society Londonand New York Zed Books

Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large CulturalDimensions of Globalization MinneapolisUniversity of Minnesota Press

Appiah KA (1992) In My Fatherrsquos House Africa in thePhilosophy of Culture New York Oxford UniversityPress

Aronowitz S (2000) The Knowledge FactoryDismantling the Corporate University and CreatingTrue Higher Learning Boston Beacon Press

Barber BR (1995) Jihad vs McWorld How Globalismand Tribalism are Reshaping the World New YorkBallantine Books

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1993) lsquoA globalizingeconomy some implications and consequencesrsquo inB Mazlish and R Buultjens (eds) ConceptualizingGlobal History pp 153ndash172 Boulder COWestview Press

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1994) Global DreamsImperial Corporations and the New World OrderNew York Simon amp Schuster

Barnouw E (1990 [1975]) Tube of Plenty TheEvolution of American Television New YorkOxford University Press

Baudrillard J (1981) For a Critique of the PoliticalEconomy of the Sign St Louis MO Telos Press

Bauman Z (1998a) Globalization The HumanConsequences New York Columbia UniversityPress

Bauman Z (1998b) lsquoPostmodern religionrsquo in P Heelas(ed) Religion Modernity and PostmodernityCambridge Blackwell

Beck U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung Frankfurt amMain Suhrkamp

Bell D (1976) The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism New York Basic Books

Benford G (1999) Deep Time How HumanityCommunicates Across Millenia New York AvonBooks Inc

Beyer P (1994) Religion and Globalization LondonSage

Brahm Jr G and Driscoll M (eds) (1995) ProstheticTerritories Politics and Hypertechnologies BoulderCO Westview

Bretherton C and Ponton G (eds) (1996) GlobalPolitics An Introduction Cambridge Blackwell

Calvino I (1974) Invisible Cities New York HarcourtBrace Jovanovich

Casanova J (1994) Public Religions in the ModernWorld Chicago University of Chicago Press

Castells M (1996ndash8) The Information Age EconomySociety and Culture Vol 1 The Rise of the

Network Society Vol 2 The Power of Identity Vol3 End of Millenium Malden MA and OxfordBlackwell Publishers

Chaunu P (1974) Historie science sociale la dureelrsquoespace et lrsquohomme a lrsquoepoque moderne ParisSociete drsquoedition drsquoenseignement superieur

Clark RP (1997) The Global Imperative AnInterpretative History of the Spread of HumankindBoulder CO Westview Press

Costello P (1993) World Historians and Their GoalsTwentieth-century Answers to Modernism DeKalbNorthern Illinois University Press

Dawkins K (1997) Gene Wars The Politics ofBiotechnology New York Seven Stories Press

de Benoist A (1996) lsquoConfronting globalizationrsquo Telos108 pp 117ndash137

Dussel E (1998) Etica de la Liberacion en la edad deglobalizacion y de la exclusion Madrid EditorialTrotta

Elias N (1992) Time An Essay Cambridge MA BasilBlackwell

Featherstone M (1995) Undoing CultureGlobalization Postmodernism and Identity LondonSage Publications

Fritsche J (1999) Historical Destiny and NationalSocialism in Heideggerrsquos Being and Time Berkeleyand Los Angeles University of California Press

Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of SocietyCambridge Polity Press

Giddens A (1987) Social Theory and ModernSociology Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of ModernityCambridge Polity Press

Gray J (1998) False Dawn The Delusions of GlobalCapitalism London Granta Books

Grossberg L (1999) lsquoSpeculations and articulations ofglobalizationrsquo Polygraph 11 pp 11ndash48

Habermas J (1992) Postmetaphysical ThinkingPhilosophical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (1998) The Inclusion of the Other Studiesin Political Theory Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (2001) The Postnational ConstellationPolitical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Hall Sir Peter (1998) Cities in Civilization New YorkPantheon Books

Hamacher W (1997) lsquoOne 2 many multiculturalismsrsquoin H de Vries and S Weber (eds) ViolenceIdentity and Self-determination Stanford CAStanford University Press

Haraway D (1991) Simians Cyborgs and WomenThe Reinvention of Nature New York Routledge

Hardt M and Negri A (2000) Empire CambridgeMA Harvard University Press

Harvey D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity AnEnquiry into the Origins of Cultural ChangeCambridge MA Basil Blackwell

Hayles NK (1999) How we Became PosthumanVirtual Bodies in Cybernetics Literature and

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 17

We make others as we make ourselves Thisreflection links up with some insights thatEnrique Dussel has had with respect to therelationship between the emergence of citiesand the development of the first codes ofethics the Hammurabi Code and the BookN of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Dussel1998) Such codes arose precisely becauseindividuals were thrown into the proximityof each other and were thus confronted witheach otherrsquos vulnerability and injurabilityThe injuction to take care of the poor theindigent the orphan the widow the invalidcould only arise out of the urban experienceof the contiguity with the injurable flesh ofthe stranger Today the experience of theindigent other is of the immigrant the exiledthe refugee who build their enclaves in theshadows of the glamorous city of transna-tional capital (King 1990 Sassen 1999) Forthis reason the other and the immigrant areinterchangeable but this also raises the issueof the new global city as a space for therepresentation and formation of post-colo-nial identities Geo-cities are spaces for thereconfiguration of image the imaginationand the imaginary as Arjun Appaduraiargued (1996) In this sense the centrality ofthe urban experience for humanity meansthat otherness is not going to be a meremetaphysical or even phenomenological cat-egory and concern Under the reign of thecity Otherness has become quotidian andpractical

Fourth another fundamental point ofdeparture for a phenomenology of global-ization will have to be the analysis of theplace of technology in our everyday lives Iwould like to understand technology in twosenses First in its broadest sense as ldquothe useof scientific knowledge to specify ways ofdoing things in a reproducible wayrdquo (Bell1976 p 29) Second as a prosthesis of thehuman body Technology to paraphrase awonderful aphorism of William Burroughsis the mind wanting more body I will discussfirst the former sense of technology as ascientific specification for the iterable way ofdoing things In this sense then a hospital is

a social technology like agriculture and cattleraising are material technologies By the sametoken prisons asylums and ghettos are socialtechnologies There is however somethingunique about technology in the 20th centuryand that is that technology itself has becomean object of technology in other words theuse of science in order to produce ever moreefficient ways of doing things in ever morereproducible ways itself has become a tech-nological quest This technology of technol-ogy is what one might call the institutional-ization of invention Alfred NorthWhitehead noted that ldquothe greatest inventionof the 19th century was the invention of themethod of inventionrdquo (Whitehead 1925 p141) What Whitehead attributes to the 19thcentury reached its true apogee in the secondhalf of the 20th century with the institu-tionalization of the research universityWhile the programme of the research uni-versity goes back to the German ideal of theuniversity it is in the USA that this ideagained its highest formalization and statesupport Without question we have to attrib-ute the greatest technological breakthroughsof the 20th century to this unique con-vergence of the state the military and theresearch university what Eisenhower calledthe militaryndashindustrial complex and whatwe now with hindsight should more appro-priately call the militaryndashuniversityndashindus-trial complex (Kenney 1986 Aronowitz2000)

The rise of the nation-state also signifiedthe rise of state-sponsored education and thestate university The university plays a dualrole On the one hand it has the function ofpreparing citizens and workers for the mate-rial and cultural-political self-reproductionof society On the other it has the role ofinstitutionalizing scientific investigation theinvention of invention Through the uni-versity the state invests in its future ability totransform its material technologies of self-reproduction Winning Nobel prizes is notjust a matter of pride it is above all aquestion of institutional power to supportimmense research budgets whose actual

18 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

industrial and technical application might befar off into the future This is one of thereasons why the USA has remained a worldpower despite its apparent military stale-mate namely because it still remains thecentre for the production of most techno-logical innovation

Related to the invention of invention whatI called the institutionalization of the tech-nology of technology as its other side is theinterpenetration of technology in everyaspect of our lives Even those who are notdirectly affected by technological revolutionsin their daily life are nonetheless indirectlyaffected insofar as their worlds economiesand cultures are made vulnerable to take-overs and colonization by those who drivethe technological revolutions of today Forthe longest period of the history of humanitytechnology remained distant from the livesand bodies of men and women not because itdid not impact them but because it did sosporadically and in such tangential ways firethe wheel the printing press the metalplough the steam engine the automobileEach technological innovation however hasmeant a further interpenetration betweentool and human body With this I turn to thediscussion of technology as prosthesis thesecond sense of technology I want to con-sider in light of a phenomenology ofglobalization

A technology is a way of doing things inways that can be reproduced again andagain and that therefore can be taught andpassed on Culture is in this sense the mostcomplex and important technology of all Inthis sense a technology is a way for asociety to extend itself across time fromgeneration to generation century to century(Giddens 1984 1987) A technology gen-erally instantiated itself in tools Tools allowparticular individuals to reach beyond theboundaries of their own bodies A tool is anextension of a particular bodily organ thataugments its original performance Tool andbody however have remained relatively dis-tinct even if one can claim that the hand isa product of our invention of tools

(Rothenberg 1993) Recognition of the dis-tinctness between tool and body does notentail the negation of their dialectical inter-dependence and co-modification Their dis-tinctness was sustained by what I havealready referred to above as the temporalityof humans and the time of the world Whenthe time of humans and the world convergewhat mediates their encounter tools hasalready fused with the body or has alreadymade the world immediate Our experienceof the world is already so mediated by ourtechnological tools that we cannot distin-guish the world from the tool and thesefrom the body We are our tools We are ourtechnological prosthesis because they arethe world (Brahm and Driscoll 1995) Butthis does not mean that technology is itselftransparent Rather technology itself hasbecome like our bodies in the sense that wedo not know how our livers hearts orbrains work we just assume that they willdo what they were designed to do and ifthey break down then we go to aspecialist

Everywhere we are surrounded by techno-logical devices which have insinuated them-selves in our lives and without which wecannot do the watch the telephone the carthe television but also toothpaste X-raysvaccines birth control pills condoms sunscreen eye-glasses shavers purified andchlorinated water and so on

What I am talking about can be illustratedby comparing Mary Shelleyrsquos Frankensteinin which a creation out of human partsbecomes monstrous precisely because itentails the complete instrumentalization ofour bodies and thus a sacrilage of its allegeddivine naturalness and Donna Harawayrsquosborgs which demonstrate and theorize towhat extent we are always already synthetic(Haraway 1991) There is no nature outsidethe confines of the laboratory Resistance isfutile to the logic of technology because weare all already borg we are products of ourtechnologies and nature exists only as anArcadian fantasy This reading should not betaken to be suggesting that nature does not

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 19

exist in the sense that it is a fiction the mirageof radical social constructivism Rather thepoint is to highlight the ways in which natureis to be thought of in terms of what today wecall the lsquorecursive loopsrsquo between technologyand nature in which nature is already anlsquoartefactrsquo and lsquomachinesrsquo are natural (Hayles1999) Indeed appropriating Marxrsquos languagefrom his 1844 manuscripts we have to talkabout the humanization of machines and themechanization of humanity

Is there a moral to be extracted by theinterpenetration of humans and their techno-logical prosthesis to the point that youcannot distinguish them any longer I wouldsay that a Heideggerian response to thisquestion is anachronistic and indefensibleOn the other hand a dia-mat in the sense ofEngelsrsquos dialectical materialism will not doeither Science is neither metaphysically badnor a malleable ideological epiphenomenonAgainst these two positions I would advo-cate what has been called Kranzbergrsquos lawwhich reads ldquotechnology is neither good norbad nor is it neutralrdquo (Castells 1996 Vol 1p 65)

I would like to summarize my reflectionsby suggesting that once a phenomenology ofglobalization takes seriously the points ofdeparture discussed above we will discoverthat globalization might stand for anotheraxial period This new axial age will becharacterized by at least these four themesfirst the perpetual revolutionizing of pro-duction technologies has turned into thetechnology of innovation in such a way thatthe generation of capital is relocated to theproduction of new information technologiesand not production and processing of rawmaterials Second because of the almostinstantaneous information transmission andreception across the world and the con-vergence of natural historical and personaltemporalities we have the effect of the de-transcendentalization and temporalization oftradition These de-transcendentalizationsand temporalizations suggest that our imagesof the world will be at the reach of our owndesign In this sense we will be able to speak

of the true secularization of the world and itscomplete humanization Third is the routini-zation and de-metaphysicalization of other-ness brought about by the hyper-urbaniza-tion of humanity Otherness will become aproduct of society and in this sense we willhave to talk of regimes of alterization Thelsquootherrsquo then will become a continuouspresence that will require our constant con-cern and vigilance Fourth is the dissolutionof the boundary between natural and syn-thetic body and tool technology and natureWe will have to speak then of the age inwhich humans have become their own crea-tions and in which the directions of thereproduction of both mind and body cultureand technology will become a concern ofpolitical practice of paramount importance

The image of the world projected byglobalization is one which collapses thedifferences between biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time whatwe see is what we get To put it in thelanguage of an essay by Theodor Adorno thehistory of nature is no different from thehistory of humanity (Adorno 1984) Global-ization also projects an image of the world inwhich otherness is not external and intract-able but produced from within Finallyglobalization is an image of the world inwhich the natural and the social the createdand uncreated have been brought togetherunder the insight that we have been produc-ing ourselves as we have been producingtools to alter the world Now however theproducing of our tools is not different fromthe production of ourselves and our worldIn the image of the world projected byglobalization the world is humanity lookingat itself through its eyes and not the eyes ofa god history or nature

III City of angels

ldquoWho is the observer when it concerns thequestion about the function of religion thesystem of religion itself or science as anexternal observerrdquo (Luhmann 2000 p 118)

20 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

The kind of phenomenology of globalizationthat I sketched above allows us to ask aboutthe kinds of challenges religion faces in anage of globalization For religion appears as aresource of images concepts traditions andpractices that can allow individuals andcommunities to deal with a world that ischanging around them by the hour (Robert-son and Garrett 1991 Luhmann 2000) Inthe new Unubersichtlichkeit [unsurveyabil-ity] of our global society religion appears ascompendium of intuitions that have not beenextinguished by the so-called process ofsecularization (Mendieta forthcoming a)Most importantly however religion cannotbe dismissed or derided because it is theprivileged if not the primary form in whichthe impoverished masses of the invisiblecities of the world (those cities to which Ipointed in the first part of this essay)articulate their hopes as well as critique theirworld

The first challenge to religion that ourphenomenology of globalization allow us toarticulate has to do with the lsquode-transcenden-talizing of othernessrsquo or what I also wouldlike to call the lsquoroutinization of othernessrsquoThere is a correlation between the wayhumanity has conceptualized otherness met-aphysically and conceptually on the onehand and humanityrsquos relationship to real andconcrete otherness as it has been experiencedexistentially and phenomenologically on theother hand This correlation has been medi-ated by humanityrsquos decreasing ruralism Inother words the less rural and thus the moreurban dwelling humans have become theless other is the otherness that we can thinkof or dream up The suggestion is that themetaphysics of alterity that has guided somuch of Western theology and religiousthinking over the last 2000 years has beendetermined by a particular asymmetrybetween the country and the city For thelongest history of humanity most societieshave been farming and rural-dwelling com-munities and associations Contact betweenextremely different communities and societ-ies was sporadic and rare and when contact

did occurred this was meditated by citydwellers and the long memory of popularmythologies But as was noted above in thedawning 21st century most humans will becity dwellers Furthermore In the 21st cen-tury most humanity will be conglomerated inthe mega-urbes of the Third World Underthis circumstance the holy other the abso-lutely other will be deflated Alterity and theextraordinary what can also be called thetremendum are de-mystified and de-met-aphysicalized (Habermas 1992 Placher1996) Either everyone will be a stranger orno one will be because we will all bestrangers in a city of strangers In such asituation otherness will have become a rou-tine an un-extra-ordinary event How thenare we to think divine alterity the othernessof the holy in a situation in which onto-logically and metaphysically all alterity hasbeen deflated demoted rendered normallevelled to the cotidian Are we in a situationof having to ldquorisk a new idea of holinessrdquo asBarry Taylor Pastor at the Sanctuary Churchin Santa Monica put it This would have tobe a holiness which is not other worldly buta holiness which is about the difference anduniqueness of others those who are oureveryday other with whom we ride thesubway with whom we walk the streets ofpopulated mega-urbes of the new age withwhom we share in anonymity the crowdedspaces of the new cities The real andmetaphorical wilderness of the world of itsjungles and forests of its undiscovered con-tinents and untamed seas of its unmappeddeserts and unnavigated rivers were excusesas well instigations to go searching for godbeyond the familial the urbane the too closeand already lsquodomesticatedrsquo God was beyondthe world other than the world Now thequestion is how do we discover the other inthe mundane difference of every fellowhuman being and the crowded city ofstrangers

The second challenge has to do with thecity as locus of the culture of consumptionas the site for an ethos of immediacyhedonism and hyper-excitation Sassen

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 21

speaks of the city as the crossroads of aconfrontation between the flows of capitaland the flows of peoples One of the waysthese flows clash in cities is through theconfrontation between cultures that isbetween different modalities of life Themore people become urban dwellers themore people are exposed to the cornucopiaof cultural possibilities It is not just thatmore people are in cities it is also that morepeople are seeking to participate in thestandards of life promised by urban dwellingThe challenges are unprecedented We arepresently choking in our own refuse in ourown garbage The psychological toil mustalso be unprecedented The level of unmetexpectations unfilled desires the gapbetween universally promised but exorbi-tantly expensive commodities that shatteredself-images and worth and that are availableto a relatively small fraction of the worldpopulation has grown exponentially Thereis another underside to the city as thecrossroads of the clash of modalities of lifeThe more cities grow the more they exerttheir pull on the so-called hinterland therural areas The more agriculture is mecha-nized and industrialized the more we adoptbiotechnology the more superfluous ldquofarm-ersrdquo become At the same time the expansionof telecommunications television and paidfor television and satellite connections havemade it easier to link up and peer into theldquotube of plentyrdquo to use that wonderfulphrase by Erik Barnouw (1990 [1975]) Thecity literally and metaphorically consumes itshinterland its outlying areas of supply itconsumes its resources and produce but alsoits cultures and its peoples

It is perhaps unnecessary to underscoreagain that most of the consumption of ruralresources is taking place in the metropolisesof the so-called First World So not onlymust we address the rampant and rapaciousconsumerism of cities in general but also theparticularly scandalous and grotesque asym-metry between the consumption of FirstWorld cities and Third World cities Thisissue becomes particularly pressing when in

the so-called advanced nations of the worldwe have thinkers intellectuals and criticstalking about a politics and culture of inclu-sion and tolerance (Habermas 1998) Thispolitics of inclusion is articulated with thebest intentions in mind The assumptionguiding it is that people throughout theworld would be better if they could partici-pate more equitably in the same kinds of so-called basic needs and luxuries that wewesterners enjoy But there is somethingprofoundly disingenuous and deleteriouslynaotildeve about such a view In some cases thepoverty of those across the world to whomwe would like to extend our standard ofliving is due precisely to our luxury Thatwhich we want to share is the cause of theprivation we want to alleviate Thus perhapsthe agenda should not be one of inclusionbut of dismantling the system that occa-sioned in the first place the exclusions webenefited and continue to benefit from

In this situation then the challengebecomes how to think of an urban culture offrugality The challenge is how to translatethe religious message and teaching of povertyas a holy way as a holy calling into a secularvalue a secular calling Another way ofputting it would be how do we translate thevisions of the desert fathers St Francis ofAssisi Mohandas Gandhi into an urbanvision for a spiritually starving youth Oralternatively if we think of what ArnoldToynbee and Eric Hobsbawn said about the20th century namely that its greatestachievement was the expansion of the middleclass then the goal for the 21st centuryshould be the expansion of a globalizedldquoliving level classrdquo In other words we haveto develop a culture for which the greatestachievement is not that everyone else will livelike us but that we will live at the level thatallows the most people to share in the mostfundamental goods potable water clean airinfant nutrition to sustain healthy standardsof unstunted growth and the possibility ofbasic education Here I would have to saythat I concur with Hardt and Negri on theircanonization of Assisi as a saint in the

22 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

hagiography of revolutionary militancy(2000 p 413)

The third challenge that our phenomenol-ogy of globalization allows us to elucidate hasto do with one of its central locus of analysisnamely the city If cities have become the siteswhere the unbundling of the state takes placethat is if we take cities to be the sites for thede-nationalizing of the national and if we atthe same time take the city as the locus of anemergent juridification or process of legal-ization of new forms of relationships then arewe not in need of having to re-think therelationship between the legal and politicalstructures of the emergent supra-nationalstate and the para- or extra-statist ldquochurchrdquoAnother way of putting it would be to notethat the church at least in the West antecedesthe modern nation-state In fact the churchwas the state and that partly because of thisthe quest for modernity the process ofmodernization entailed a secularization ofstate and legal structures In the process thechurchrsquos sphere of operation becamerestricted or constrained by the spaces drawnby the boundaries of nation-states Churchesand denominations became identified withnational boundaries which took place not-withstanding the underlying and fundamentaluniversalist thrust of Christianity If weaccept Sassenrsquos analysis which we must giventhe overwhelming evidence then we areinescapably put in the situation of having tore-think the relationship between the churchand the state In fact as the nation-states of the19th and 20th century are unbundled andnew forms of political and legal rights emergein de-territorialized and de-nationalizedforms of political self-determination then thechurch itself will have to face its de-national-ization and de-territorialization At the sametime however one of the fundamental condi-tions of the presence of the church in the 21stcentury will have to be that it must havelearned the lessons of the last 500 years ofcolonialism imperialism and post-colonial-ism This means that the challenge is dual Onthe one hand the new church must find aplace beyond the nation-states of political

modernity but on the other hand it must doso with a post-colonialist and post-imperialistattitude In the age of global transformationsthe new church cannot and will not be able toserve as an agent of globalization for the newimperial masters that began to profile them-selves in the horizon namely a united front ofEuropean nations (an expanded NATO) atechnological elite bent on re-designingnature and a cosmopolitan nobility withoutcontrols allegiances or consciences

Fourth and finally I think that anotherextremely important challenge has to do withthe insight that cities are the places wherecultures come to cultivate each other Inother words cities are the places where oldcultures are cannibalized but also carniv-alized where old cultures which are dyingcome to be renewed but also where newcultures are produced from the remains ofold ones (Hamacher 1997) Cities are germi-nals of new cultures Indeed just as we arevery likely to find micro-climates in mostglobal cities we are likely to find culturalenclaves little Italys Chinatowns Japan-towns little Bombays etc These places arewhere the centripetal and centrifugal forcesof homogenization and heterogenizationinteract to produce new cultural formationsUnderlying this new cultural genesis is itsevident and almost presentist character Theprocesses of cultural genesis take place rightin front of our eyes Cultures are notmillennial sedimentations and even thatwhich is peddled as the oldest is a present-day version of the old Most importantlycultures have become something we produceand choose cultures are something which weeither nurture and preserve or abandon anddisavow In all of these cases we are notpassive but active agents of transformationIn this situation the challenge for the newchurch for an urban ministry for the 21stcentury is how to develop an ecclesiology ofcultural diversity How will the new churchparticipate in this cultural genesis that isgerminating in global cities while retaining asense of identity Or conversely how will itretain a sense of cultural identity without

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 23

becoming either ethnocentric or jingoisticabout its cultural bequest without contribut-ing to the ossification of its own culture Onwhat terms can the new church participate inthe creation of new cultures and the preser-vation of successful ones

Conclusion

Cities are the vortex of the convergence ofthe processes of globalization and local-ization Cities are epitomes of glocalizationto use Robertsonrsquos language (1994) They arealso sites of the sedimentation of history Inthis essay I have sough to advance theresearch agenda that would take the ldquoinvisi-ble citiesrdquo of the so-called Third World astheir primary object of analysis At the sametime however I have urged that we look atthe cities in the developed industrializedworld through the eyes of their invisibleinhabitants and citizens immigrants ethnicminorities disenfranchised groups workerswomen and the youth There are invisiblecities within the cities that are so visible inmost urban theory and analysis as well asinvisible cities that remain unseen becausethey are not on the horizon of the academicagendas of researchers in the universities ofthe developed world

In tandem I have suspended judgementon whether to be for or against global-ization not because I do not think that wecan make moral judgments in this case butbecause I think we need to broaden ouranalyses of this new order of things Ideveloped some general points of departurefor a phenomenological analysis of global-ization This particular approach I thinkexhibits how ldquoglobalizationrdquo can and oughtto become a matter for serious philosophicalreflection I have identified the issues ofalterity temporality tradition the distinc-tion between the natural and the syntheticas philosophemes that are substantivelyimpacted by the processes of globalizationYet the phenomenological approach Iarticulate is deliberate in assuming a partic-

ular perspective or angle of approach I havesought to delineate a phenomenology ofglobalization from below The world doesnot disclose itself in the same way to allsubjects much less globalization Thus thephenomenology here presented urges us tolook at the world from below from theperspective of those who seem to be moreadversely than beneficially affected by theprocesses that make up globalization

This is what the ldquobelowrdquo in the subtitle ofthe essay pointed to the below of the poorand destitute the below of those who are notseen and do not register in the radar of socialtheory Furthermore I have tried to furtherqualify that perspective from below byfocusing my attention on the issue of reli-gion Religion clearly can mean manythings but at the very least it means ldquothe sighof the oppressedrdquo and the ldquoencyclopediccompendiumrdquo of a heartless world as Marxput it (1994 p 28) if only because it is theform in which the destitute the most vulner-able in our world express their critiques aswell as hopes I have argued that we ought tolook at cities as germinals of new culturesand that if we want to trace the emergentcultures of those ldquobelowrdquo then we betterlook at religious movements In what waysare the religious language of the oppressedand disenfranchised of the invisible cities ofglobalization critiques and resistances toglobalization This is clearly a researchdesideratum rather than a description oreven assessment

Note

1 I want to thank Bob Catterall for encouraging me towrite this article and for his comments on earlyversions of it I also want to thank Lois AnnLorentzen and Nelson Maldonado Torres who readit with great care and made substantive suggestionscorrections and criticisms that have made meunderstand better my own project I also want tothank Enrique Dussel Jurgen Habermas WalterMignolo and Santiago Castro-Gomez with whom Ihave discussed many of the ideas here developedand who have given me impetus to continue alongthis line with their own pioneering works

24 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Bibliography

Adorno TW (1984) lsquoThe idea of natural historyrsquo Telos60 pp 31ndash42

Amin S (1996) Capitalism in the Age of GlobalizationThe Management of Contemporary Society Londonand New York Zed Books

Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large CulturalDimensions of Globalization MinneapolisUniversity of Minnesota Press

Appiah KA (1992) In My Fatherrsquos House Africa in thePhilosophy of Culture New York Oxford UniversityPress

Aronowitz S (2000) The Knowledge FactoryDismantling the Corporate University and CreatingTrue Higher Learning Boston Beacon Press

Barber BR (1995) Jihad vs McWorld How Globalismand Tribalism are Reshaping the World New YorkBallantine Books

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1993) lsquoA globalizingeconomy some implications and consequencesrsquo inB Mazlish and R Buultjens (eds) ConceptualizingGlobal History pp 153ndash172 Boulder COWestview Press

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1994) Global DreamsImperial Corporations and the New World OrderNew York Simon amp Schuster

Barnouw E (1990 [1975]) Tube of Plenty TheEvolution of American Television New YorkOxford University Press

Baudrillard J (1981) For a Critique of the PoliticalEconomy of the Sign St Louis MO Telos Press

Bauman Z (1998a) Globalization The HumanConsequences New York Columbia UniversityPress

Bauman Z (1998b) lsquoPostmodern religionrsquo in P Heelas(ed) Religion Modernity and PostmodernityCambridge Blackwell

Beck U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung Frankfurt amMain Suhrkamp

Bell D (1976) The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism New York Basic Books

Benford G (1999) Deep Time How HumanityCommunicates Across Millenia New York AvonBooks Inc

Beyer P (1994) Religion and Globalization LondonSage

Brahm Jr G and Driscoll M (eds) (1995) ProstheticTerritories Politics and Hypertechnologies BoulderCO Westview

Bretherton C and Ponton G (eds) (1996) GlobalPolitics An Introduction Cambridge Blackwell

Calvino I (1974) Invisible Cities New York HarcourtBrace Jovanovich

Casanova J (1994) Public Religions in the ModernWorld Chicago University of Chicago Press

Castells M (1996ndash8) The Information Age EconomySociety and Culture Vol 1 The Rise of the

Network Society Vol 2 The Power of Identity Vol3 End of Millenium Malden MA and OxfordBlackwell Publishers

Chaunu P (1974) Historie science sociale la dureelrsquoespace et lrsquohomme a lrsquoepoque moderne ParisSociete drsquoedition drsquoenseignement superieur

Clark RP (1997) The Global Imperative AnInterpretative History of the Spread of HumankindBoulder CO Westview Press

Costello P (1993) World Historians and Their GoalsTwentieth-century Answers to Modernism DeKalbNorthern Illinois University Press

Dawkins K (1997) Gene Wars The Politics ofBiotechnology New York Seven Stories Press

de Benoist A (1996) lsquoConfronting globalizationrsquo Telos108 pp 117ndash137

Dussel E (1998) Etica de la Liberacion en la edad deglobalizacion y de la exclusion Madrid EditorialTrotta

Elias N (1992) Time An Essay Cambridge MA BasilBlackwell

Featherstone M (1995) Undoing CultureGlobalization Postmodernism and Identity LondonSage Publications

Fritsche J (1999) Historical Destiny and NationalSocialism in Heideggerrsquos Being and Time Berkeleyand Los Angeles University of California Press

Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of SocietyCambridge Polity Press

Giddens A (1987) Social Theory and ModernSociology Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of ModernityCambridge Polity Press

Gray J (1998) False Dawn The Delusions of GlobalCapitalism London Granta Books

Grossberg L (1999) lsquoSpeculations and articulations ofglobalizationrsquo Polygraph 11 pp 11ndash48

Habermas J (1992) Postmetaphysical ThinkingPhilosophical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (1998) The Inclusion of the Other Studiesin Political Theory Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (2001) The Postnational ConstellationPolitical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Hall Sir Peter (1998) Cities in Civilization New YorkPantheon Books

Hamacher W (1997) lsquoOne 2 many multiculturalismsrsquoin H de Vries and S Weber (eds) ViolenceIdentity and Self-determination Stanford CAStanford University Press

Haraway D (1991) Simians Cyborgs and WomenThe Reinvention of Nature New York Routledge

Hardt M and Negri A (2000) Empire CambridgeMA Harvard University Press

Harvey D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity AnEnquiry into the Origins of Cultural ChangeCambridge MA Basil Blackwell

Hayles NK (1999) How we Became PosthumanVirtual Bodies in Cybernetics Literature and

18 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

industrial and technical application might befar off into the future This is one of thereasons why the USA has remained a worldpower despite its apparent military stale-mate namely because it still remains thecentre for the production of most techno-logical innovation

Related to the invention of invention whatI called the institutionalization of the tech-nology of technology as its other side is theinterpenetration of technology in everyaspect of our lives Even those who are notdirectly affected by technological revolutionsin their daily life are nonetheless indirectlyaffected insofar as their worlds economiesand cultures are made vulnerable to take-overs and colonization by those who drivethe technological revolutions of today Forthe longest period of the history of humanitytechnology remained distant from the livesand bodies of men and women not because itdid not impact them but because it did sosporadically and in such tangential ways firethe wheel the printing press the metalplough the steam engine the automobileEach technological innovation however hasmeant a further interpenetration betweentool and human body With this I turn to thediscussion of technology as prosthesis thesecond sense of technology I want to con-sider in light of a phenomenology ofglobalization

A technology is a way of doing things inways that can be reproduced again andagain and that therefore can be taught andpassed on Culture is in this sense the mostcomplex and important technology of all Inthis sense a technology is a way for asociety to extend itself across time fromgeneration to generation century to century(Giddens 1984 1987) A technology gen-erally instantiated itself in tools Tools allowparticular individuals to reach beyond theboundaries of their own bodies A tool is anextension of a particular bodily organ thataugments its original performance Tool andbody however have remained relatively dis-tinct even if one can claim that the hand isa product of our invention of tools

(Rothenberg 1993) Recognition of the dis-tinctness between tool and body does notentail the negation of their dialectical inter-dependence and co-modification Their dis-tinctness was sustained by what I havealready referred to above as the temporalityof humans and the time of the world Whenthe time of humans and the world convergewhat mediates their encounter tools hasalready fused with the body or has alreadymade the world immediate Our experienceof the world is already so mediated by ourtechnological tools that we cannot distin-guish the world from the tool and thesefrom the body We are our tools We are ourtechnological prosthesis because they arethe world (Brahm and Driscoll 1995) Butthis does not mean that technology is itselftransparent Rather technology itself hasbecome like our bodies in the sense that wedo not know how our livers hearts orbrains work we just assume that they willdo what they were designed to do and ifthey break down then we go to aspecialist

Everywhere we are surrounded by techno-logical devices which have insinuated them-selves in our lives and without which wecannot do the watch the telephone the carthe television but also toothpaste X-raysvaccines birth control pills condoms sunscreen eye-glasses shavers purified andchlorinated water and so on

What I am talking about can be illustratedby comparing Mary Shelleyrsquos Frankensteinin which a creation out of human partsbecomes monstrous precisely because itentails the complete instrumentalization ofour bodies and thus a sacrilage of its allegeddivine naturalness and Donna Harawayrsquosborgs which demonstrate and theorize towhat extent we are always already synthetic(Haraway 1991) There is no nature outsidethe confines of the laboratory Resistance isfutile to the logic of technology because weare all already borg we are products of ourtechnologies and nature exists only as anArcadian fantasy This reading should not betaken to be suggesting that nature does not

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 19

exist in the sense that it is a fiction the mirageof radical social constructivism Rather thepoint is to highlight the ways in which natureis to be thought of in terms of what today wecall the lsquorecursive loopsrsquo between technologyand nature in which nature is already anlsquoartefactrsquo and lsquomachinesrsquo are natural (Hayles1999) Indeed appropriating Marxrsquos languagefrom his 1844 manuscripts we have to talkabout the humanization of machines and themechanization of humanity

Is there a moral to be extracted by theinterpenetration of humans and their techno-logical prosthesis to the point that youcannot distinguish them any longer I wouldsay that a Heideggerian response to thisquestion is anachronistic and indefensibleOn the other hand a dia-mat in the sense ofEngelsrsquos dialectical materialism will not doeither Science is neither metaphysically badnor a malleable ideological epiphenomenonAgainst these two positions I would advo-cate what has been called Kranzbergrsquos lawwhich reads ldquotechnology is neither good norbad nor is it neutralrdquo (Castells 1996 Vol 1p 65)

I would like to summarize my reflectionsby suggesting that once a phenomenology ofglobalization takes seriously the points ofdeparture discussed above we will discoverthat globalization might stand for anotheraxial period This new axial age will becharacterized by at least these four themesfirst the perpetual revolutionizing of pro-duction technologies has turned into thetechnology of innovation in such a way thatthe generation of capital is relocated to theproduction of new information technologiesand not production and processing of rawmaterials Second because of the almostinstantaneous information transmission andreception across the world and the con-vergence of natural historical and personaltemporalities we have the effect of the de-transcendentalization and temporalization oftradition These de-transcendentalizationsand temporalizations suggest that our imagesof the world will be at the reach of our owndesign In this sense we will be able to speak

of the true secularization of the world and itscomplete humanization Third is the routini-zation and de-metaphysicalization of other-ness brought about by the hyper-urbaniza-tion of humanity Otherness will become aproduct of society and in this sense we willhave to talk of regimes of alterization Thelsquootherrsquo then will become a continuouspresence that will require our constant con-cern and vigilance Fourth is the dissolutionof the boundary between natural and syn-thetic body and tool technology and natureWe will have to speak then of the age inwhich humans have become their own crea-tions and in which the directions of thereproduction of both mind and body cultureand technology will become a concern ofpolitical practice of paramount importance

The image of the world projected byglobalization is one which collapses thedifferences between biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time whatwe see is what we get To put it in thelanguage of an essay by Theodor Adorno thehistory of nature is no different from thehistory of humanity (Adorno 1984) Global-ization also projects an image of the world inwhich otherness is not external and intract-able but produced from within Finallyglobalization is an image of the world inwhich the natural and the social the createdand uncreated have been brought togetherunder the insight that we have been produc-ing ourselves as we have been producingtools to alter the world Now however theproducing of our tools is not different fromthe production of ourselves and our worldIn the image of the world projected byglobalization the world is humanity lookingat itself through its eyes and not the eyes ofa god history or nature

III City of angels

ldquoWho is the observer when it concerns thequestion about the function of religion thesystem of religion itself or science as anexternal observerrdquo (Luhmann 2000 p 118)

20 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

The kind of phenomenology of globalizationthat I sketched above allows us to ask aboutthe kinds of challenges religion faces in anage of globalization For religion appears as aresource of images concepts traditions andpractices that can allow individuals andcommunities to deal with a world that ischanging around them by the hour (Robert-son and Garrett 1991 Luhmann 2000) Inthe new Unubersichtlichkeit [unsurveyabil-ity] of our global society religion appears ascompendium of intuitions that have not beenextinguished by the so-called process ofsecularization (Mendieta forthcoming a)Most importantly however religion cannotbe dismissed or derided because it is theprivileged if not the primary form in whichthe impoverished masses of the invisiblecities of the world (those cities to which Ipointed in the first part of this essay)articulate their hopes as well as critique theirworld

The first challenge to religion that ourphenomenology of globalization allow us toarticulate has to do with the lsquode-transcenden-talizing of othernessrsquo or what I also wouldlike to call the lsquoroutinization of othernessrsquoThere is a correlation between the wayhumanity has conceptualized otherness met-aphysically and conceptually on the onehand and humanityrsquos relationship to real andconcrete otherness as it has been experiencedexistentially and phenomenologically on theother hand This correlation has been medi-ated by humanityrsquos decreasing ruralism Inother words the less rural and thus the moreurban dwelling humans have become theless other is the otherness that we can thinkof or dream up The suggestion is that themetaphysics of alterity that has guided somuch of Western theology and religiousthinking over the last 2000 years has beendetermined by a particular asymmetrybetween the country and the city For thelongest history of humanity most societieshave been farming and rural-dwelling com-munities and associations Contact betweenextremely different communities and societ-ies was sporadic and rare and when contact

did occurred this was meditated by citydwellers and the long memory of popularmythologies But as was noted above in thedawning 21st century most humans will becity dwellers Furthermore In the 21st cen-tury most humanity will be conglomerated inthe mega-urbes of the Third World Underthis circumstance the holy other the abso-lutely other will be deflated Alterity and theextraordinary what can also be called thetremendum are de-mystified and de-met-aphysicalized (Habermas 1992 Placher1996) Either everyone will be a stranger orno one will be because we will all bestrangers in a city of strangers In such asituation otherness will have become a rou-tine an un-extra-ordinary event How thenare we to think divine alterity the othernessof the holy in a situation in which onto-logically and metaphysically all alterity hasbeen deflated demoted rendered normallevelled to the cotidian Are we in a situationof having to ldquorisk a new idea of holinessrdquo asBarry Taylor Pastor at the Sanctuary Churchin Santa Monica put it This would have tobe a holiness which is not other worldly buta holiness which is about the difference anduniqueness of others those who are oureveryday other with whom we ride thesubway with whom we walk the streets ofpopulated mega-urbes of the new age withwhom we share in anonymity the crowdedspaces of the new cities The real andmetaphorical wilderness of the world of itsjungles and forests of its undiscovered con-tinents and untamed seas of its unmappeddeserts and unnavigated rivers were excusesas well instigations to go searching for godbeyond the familial the urbane the too closeand already lsquodomesticatedrsquo God was beyondthe world other than the world Now thequestion is how do we discover the other inthe mundane difference of every fellowhuman being and the crowded city ofstrangers

The second challenge has to do with thecity as locus of the culture of consumptionas the site for an ethos of immediacyhedonism and hyper-excitation Sassen

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 21

speaks of the city as the crossroads of aconfrontation between the flows of capitaland the flows of peoples One of the waysthese flows clash in cities is through theconfrontation between cultures that isbetween different modalities of life Themore people become urban dwellers themore people are exposed to the cornucopiaof cultural possibilities It is not just thatmore people are in cities it is also that morepeople are seeking to participate in thestandards of life promised by urban dwellingThe challenges are unprecedented We arepresently choking in our own refuse in ourown garbage The psychological toil mustalso be unprecedented The level of unmetexpectations unfilled desires the gapbetween universally promised but exorbi-tantly expensive commodities that shatteredself-images and worth and that are availableto a relatively small fraction of the worldpopulation has grown exponentially Thereis another underside to the city as thecrossroads of the clash of modalities of lifeThe more cities grow the more they exerttheir pull on the so-called hinterland therural areas The more agriculture is mecha-nized and industrialized the more we adoptbiotechnology the more superfluous ldquofarm-ersrdquo become At the same time the expansionof telecommunications television and paidfor television and satellite connections havemade it easier to link up and peer into theldquotube of plentyrdquo to use that wonderfulphrase by Erik Barnouw (1990 [1975]) Thecity literally and metaphorically consumes itshinterland its outlying areas of supply itconsumes its resources and produce but alsoits cultures and its peoples

It is perhaps unnecessary to underscoreagain that most of the consumption of ruralresources is taking place in the metropolisesof the so-called First World So not onlymust we address the rampant and rapaciousconsumerism of cities in general but also theparticularly scandalous and grotesque asym-metry between the consumption of FirstWorld cities and Third World cities Thisissue becomes particularly pressing when in

the so-called advanced nations of the worldwe have thinkers intellectuals and criticstalking about a politics and culture of inclu-sion and tolerance (Habermas 1998) Thispolitics of inclusion is articulated with thebest intentions in mind The assumptionguiding it is that people throughout theworld would be better if they could partici-pate more equitably in the same kinds of so-called basic needs and luxuries that wewesterners enjoy But there is somethingprofoundly disingenuous and deleteriouslynaotildeve about such a view In some cases thepoverty of those across the world to whomwe would like to extend our standard ofliving is due precisely to our luxury Thatwhich we want to share is the cause of theprivation we want to alleviate Thus perhapsthe agenda should not be one of inclusionbut of dismantling the system that occa-sioned in the first place the exclusions webenefited and continue to benefit from

In this situation then the challengebecomes how to think of an urban culture offrugality The challenge is how to translatethe religious message and teaching of povertyas a holy way as a holy calling into a secularvalue a secular calling Another way ofputting it would be how do we translate thevisions of the desert fathers St Francis ofAssisi Mohandas Gandhi into an urbanvision for a spiritually starving youth Oralternatively if we think of what ArnoldToynbee and Eric Hobsbawn said about the20th century namely that its greatestachievement was the expansion of the middleclass then the goal for the 21st centuryshould be the expansion of a globalizedldquoliving level classrdquo In other words we haveto develop a culture for which the greatestachievement is not that everyone else will livelike us but that we will live at the level thatallows the most people to share in the mostfundamental goods potable water clean airinfant nutrition to sustain healthy standardsof unstunted growth and the possibility ofbasic education Here I would have to saythat I concur with Hardt and Negri on theircanonization of Assisi as a saint in the

22 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

hagiography of revolutionary militancy(2000 p 413)

The third challenge that our phenomenol-ogy of globalization allows us to elucidate hasto do with one of its central locus of analysisnamely the city If cities have become the siteswhere the unbundling of the state takes placethat is if we take cities to be the sites for thede-nationalizing of the national and if we atthe same time take the city as the locus of anemergent juridification or process of legal-ization of new forms of relationships then arewe not in need of having to re-think therelationship between the legal and politicalstructures of the emergent supra-nationalstate and the para- or extra-statist ldquochurchrdquoAnother way of putting it would be to notethat the church at least in the West antecedesthe modern nation-state In fact the churchwas the state and that partly because of thisthe quest for modernity the process ofmodernization entailed a secularization ofstate and legal structures In the process thechurchrsquos sphere of operation becamerestricted or constrained by the spaces drawnby the boundaries of nation-states Churchesand denominations became identified withnational boundaries which took place not-withstanding the underlying and fundamentaluniversalist thrust of Christianity If weaccept Sassenrsquos analysis which we must giventhe overwhelming evidence then we areinescapably put in the situation of having tore-think the relationship between the churchand the state In fact as the nation-states of the19th and 20th century are unbundled andnew forms of political and legal rights emergein de-territorialized and de-nationalizedforms of political self-determination then thechurch itself will have to face its de-national-ization and de-territorialization At the sametime however one of the fundamental condi-tions of the presence of the church in the 21stcentury will have to be that it must havelearned the lessons of the last 500 years ofcolonialism imperialism and post-colonial-ism This means that the challenge is dual Onthe one hand the new church must find aplace beyond the nation-states of political

modernity but on the other hand it must doso with a post-colonialist and post-imperialistattitude In the age of global transformationsthe new church cannot and will not be able toserve as an agent of globalization for the newimperial masters that began to profile them-selves in the horizon namely a united front ofEuropean nations (an expanded NATO) atechnological elite bent on re-designingnature and a cosmopolitan nobility withoutcontrols allegiances or consciences

Fourth and finally I think that anotherextremely important challenge has to do withthe insight that cities are the places wherecultures come to cultivate each other Inother words cities are the places where oldcultures are cannibalized but also carniv-alized where old cultures which are dyingcome to be renewed but also where newcultures are produced from the remains ofold ones (Hamacher 1997) Cities are germi-nals of new cultures Indeed just as we arevery likely to find micro-climates in mostglobal cities we are likely to find culturalenclaves little Italys Chinatowns Japan-towns little Bombays etc These places arewhere the centripetal and centrifugal forcesof homogenization and heterogenizationinteract to produce new cultural formationsUnderlying this new cultural genesis is itsevident and almost presentist character Theprocesses of cultural genesis take place rightin front of our eyes Cultures are notmillennial sedimentations and even thatwhich is peddled as the oldest is a present-day version of the old Most importantlycultures have become something we produceand choose cultures are something which weeither nurture and preserve or abandon anddisavow In all of these cases we are notpassive but active agents of transformationIn this situation the challenge for the newchurch for an urban ministry for the 21stcentury is how to develop an ecclesiology ofcultural diversity How will the new churchparticipate in this cultural genesis that isgerminating in global cities while retaining asense of identity Or conversely how will itretain a sense of cultural identity without

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 23

becoming either ethnocentric or jingoisticabout its cultural bequest without contribut-ing to the ossification of its own culture Onwhat terms can the new church participate inthe creation of new cultures and the preser-vation of successful ones

Conclusion

Cities are the vortex of the convergence ofthe processes of globalization and local-ization Cities are epitomes of glocalizationto use Robertsonrsquos language (1994) They arealso sites of the sedimentation of history Inthis essay I have sough to advance theresearch agenda that would take the ldquoinvisi-ble citiesrdquo of the so-called Third World astheir primary object of analysis At the sametime however I have urged that we look atthe cities in the developed industrializedworld through the eyes of their invisibleinhabitants and citizens immigrants ethnicminorities disenfranchised groups workerswomen and the youth There are invisiblecities within the cities that are so visible inmost urban theory and analysis as well asinvisible cities that remain unseen becausethey are not on the horizon of the academicagendas of researchers in the universities ofthe developed world

In tandem I have suspended judgementon whether to be for or against global-ization not because I do not think that wecan make moral judgments in this case butbecause I think we need to broaden ouranalyses of this new order of things Ideveloped some general points of departurefor a phenomenological analysis of global-ization This particular approach I thinkexhibits how ldquoglobalizationrdquo can and oughtto become a matter for serious philosophicalreflection I have identified the issues ofalterity temporality tradition the distinc-tion between the natural and the syntheticas philosophemes that are substantivelyimpacted by the processes of globalizationYet the phenomenological approach Iarticulate is deliberate in assuming a partic-

ular perspective or angle of approach I havesought to delineate a phenomenology ofglobalization from below The world doesnot disclose itself in the same way to allsubjects much less globalization Thus thephenomenology here presented urges us tolook at the world from below from theperspective of those who seem to be moreadversely than beneficially affected by theprocesses that make up globalization

This is what the ldquobelowrdquo in the subtitle ofthe essay pointed to the below of the poorand destitute the below of those who are notseen and do not register in the radar of socialtheory Furthermore I have tried to furtherqualify that perspective from below byfocusing my attention on the issue of reli-gion Religion clearly can mean manythings but at the very least it means ldquothe sighof the oppressedrdquo and the ldquoencyclopediccompendiumrdquo of a heartless world as Marxput it (1994 p 28) if only because it is theform in which the destitute the most vulner-able in our world express their critiques aswell as hopes I have argued that we ought tolook at cities as germinals of new culturesand that if we want to trace the emergentcultures of those ldquobelowrdquo then we betterlook at religious movements In what waysare the religious language of the oppressedand disenfranchised of the invisible cities ofglobalization critiques and resistances toglobalization This is clearly a researchdesideratum rather than a description oreven assessment

Note

1 I want to thank Bob Catterall for encouraging me towrite this article and for his comments on earlyversions of it I also want to thank Lois AnnLorentzen and Nelson Maldonado Torres who readit with great care and made substantive suggestionscorrections and criticisms that have made meunderstand better my own project I also want tothank Enrique Dussel Jurgen Habermas WalterMignolo and Santiago Castro-Gomez with whom Ihave discussed many of the ideas here developedand who have given me impetus to continue alongthis line with their own pioneering works

24 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Bibliography

Adorno TW (1984) lsquoThe idea of natural historyrsquo Telos60 pp 31ndash42

Amin S (1996) Capitalism in the Age of GlobalizationThe Management of Contemporary Society Londonand New York Zed Books

Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large CulturalDimensions of Globalization MinneapolisUniversity of Minnesota Press

Appiah KA (1992) In My Fatherrsquos House Africa in thePhilosophy of Culture New York Oxford UniversityPress

Aronowitz S (2000) The Knowledge FactoryDismantling the Corporate University and CreatingTrue Higher Learning Boston Beacon Press

Barber BR (1995) Jihad vs McWorld How Globalismand Tribalism are Reshaping the World New YorkBallantine Books

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1993) lsquoA globalizingeconomy some implications and consequencesrsquo inB Mazlish and R Buultjens (eds) ConceptualizingGlobal History pp 153ndash172 Boulder COWestview Press

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1994) Global DreamsImperial Corporations and the New World OrderNew York Simon amp Schuster

Barnouw E (1990 [1975]) Tube of Plenty TheEvolution of American Television New YorkOxford University Press

Baudrillard J (1981) For a Critique of the PoliticalEconomy of the Sign St Louis MO Telos Press

Bauman Z (1998a) Globalization The HumanConsequences New York Columbia UniversityPress

Bauman Z (1998b) lsquoPostmodern religionrsquo in P Heelas(ed) Religion Modernity and PostmodernityCambridge Blackwell

Beck U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung Frankfurt amMain Suhrkamp

Bell D (1976) The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism New York Basic Books

Benford G (1999) Deep Time How HumanityCommunicates Across Millenia New York AvonBooks Inc

Beyer P (1994) Religion and Globalization LondonSage

Brahm Jr G and Driscoll M (eds) (1995) ProstheticTerritories Politics and Hypertechnologies BoulderCO Westview

Bretherton C and Ponton G (eds) (1996) GlobalPolitics An Introduction Cambridge Blackwell

Calvino I (1974) Invisible Cities New York HarcourtBrace Jovanovich

Casanova J (1994) Public Religions in the ModernWorld Chicago University of Chicago Press

Castells M (1996ndash8) The Information Age EconomySociety and Culture Vol 1 The Rise of the

Network Society Vol 2 The Power of Identity Vol3 End of Millenium Malden MA and OxfordBlackwell Publishers

Chaunu P (1974) Historie science sociale la dureelrsquoespace et lrsquohomme a lrsquoepoque moderne ParisSociete drsquoedition drsquoenseignement superieur

Clark RP (1997) The Global Imperative AnInterpretative History of the Spread of HumankindBoulder CO Westview Press

Costello P (1993) World Historians and Their GoalsTwentieth-century Answers to Modernism DeKalbNorthern Illinois University Press

Dawkins K (1997) Gene Wars The Politics ofBiotechnology New York Seven Stories Press

de Benoist A (1996) lsquoConfronting globalizationrsquo Telos108 pp 117ndash137

Dussel E (1998) Etica de la Liberacion en la edad deglobalizacion y de la exclusion Madrid EditorialTrotta

Elias N (1992) Time An Essay Cambridge MA BasilBlackwell

Featherstone M (1995) Undoing CultureGlobalization Postmodernism and Identity LondonSage Publications

Fritsche J (1999) Historical Destiny and NationalSocialism in Heideggerrsquos Being and Time Berkeleyand Los Angeles University of California Press

Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of SocietyCambridge Polity Press

Giddens A (1987) Social Theory and ModernSociology Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of ModernityCambridge Polity Press

Gray J (1998) False Dawn The Delusions of GlobalCapitalism London Granta Books

Grossberg L (1999) lsquoSpeculations and articulations ofglobalizationrsquo Polygraph 11 pp 11ndash48

Habermas J (1992) Postmetaphysical ThinkingPhilosophical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (1998) The Inclusion of the Other Studiesin Political Theory Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (2001) The Postnational ConstellationPolitical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Hall Sir Peter (1998) Cities in Civilization New YorkPantheon Books

Hamacher W (1997) lsquoOne 2 many multiculturalismsrsquoin H de Vries and S Weber (eds) ViolenceIdentity and Self-determination Stanford CAStanford University Press

Haraway D (1991) Simians Cyborgs and WomenThe Reinvention of Nature New York Routledge

Hardt M and Negri A (2000) Empire CambridgeMA Harvard University Press

Harvey D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity AnEnquiry into the Origins of Cultural ChangeCambridge MA Basil Blackwell

Hayles NK (1999) How we Became PosthumanVirtual Bodies in Cybernetics Literature and

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 19

exist in the sense that it is a fiction the mirageof radical social constructivism Rather thepoint is to highlight the ways in which natureis to be thought of in terms of what today wecall the lsquorecursive loopsrsquo between technologyand nature in which nature is already anlsquoartefactrsquo and lsquomachinesrsquo are natural (Hayles1999) Indeed appropriating Marxrsquos languagefrom his 1844 manuscripts we have to talkabout the humanization of machines and themechanization of humanity

Is there a moral to be extracted by theinterpenetration of humans and their techno-logical prosthesis to the point that youcannot distinguish them any longer I wouldsay that a Heideggerian response to thisquestion is anachronistic and indefensibleOn the other hand a dia-mat in the sense ofEngelsrsquos dialectical materialism will not doeither Science is neither metaphysically badnor a malleable ideological epiphenomenonAgainst these two positions I would advo-cate what has been called Kranzbergrsquos lawwhich reads ldquotechnology is neither good norbad nor is it neutralrdquo (Castells 1996 Vol 1p 65)

I would like to summarize my reflectionsby suggesting that once a phenomenology ofglobalization takes seriously the points ofdeparture discussed above we will discoverthat globalization might stand for anotheraxial period This new axial age will becharacterized by at least these four themesfirst the perpetual revolutionizing of pro-duction technologies has turned into thetechnology of innovation in such a way thatthe generation of capital is relocated to theproduction of new information technologiesand not production and processing of rawmaterials Second because of the almostinstantaneous information transmission andreception across the world and the con-vergence of natural historical and personaltemporalities we have the effect of the de-transcendentalization and temporalization oftradition These de-transcendentalizationsand temporalizations suggest that our imagesof the world will be at the reach of our owndesign In this sense we will be able to speak

of the true secularization of the world and itscomplete humanization Third is the routini-zation and de-metaphysicalization of other-ness brought about by the hyper-urbaniza-tion of humanity Otherness will become aproduct of society and in this sense we willhave to talk of regimes of alterization Thelsquootherrsquo then will become a continuouspresence that will require our constant con-cern and vigilance Fourth is the dissolutionof the boundary between natural and syn-thetic body and tool technology and natureWe will have to speak then of the age inwhich humans have become their own crea-tions and in which the directions of thereproduction of both mind and body cultureand technology will become a concern ofpolitical practice of paramount importance

The image of the world projected byglobalization is one which collapses thedifferences between biomorphic space-timesocial space-time and world space-time whatwe see is what we get To put it in thelanguage of an essay by Theodor Adorno thehistory of nature is no different from thehistory of humanity (Adorno 1984) Global-ization also projects an image of the world inwhich otherness is not external and intract-able but produced from within Finallyglobalization is an image of the world inwhich the natural and the social the createdand uncreated have been brought togetherunder the insight that we have been produc-ing ourselves as we have been producingtools to alter the world Now however theproducing of our tools is not different fromthe production of ourselves and our worldIn the image of the world projected byglobalization the world is humanity lookingat itself through its eyes and not the eyes ofa god history or nature

III City of angels

ldquoWho is the observer when it concerns thequestion about the function of religion thesystem of religion itself or science as anexternal observerrdquo (Luhmann 2000 p 118)

20 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

The kind of phenomenology of globalizationthat I sketched above allows us to ask aboutthe kinds of challenges religion faces in anage of globalization For religion appears as aresource of images concepts traditions andpractices that can allow individuals andcommunities to deal with a world that ischanging around them by the hour (Robert-son and Garrett 1991 Luhmann 2000) Inthe new Unubersichtlichkeit [unsurveyabil-ity] of our global society religion appears ascompendium of intuitions that have not beenextinguished by the so-called process ofsecularization (Mendieta forthcoming a)Most importantly however religion cannotbe dismissed or derided because it is theprivileged if not the primary form in whichthe impoverished masses of the invisiblecities of the world (those cities to which Ipointed in the first part of this essay)articulate their hopes as well as critique theirworld

The first challenge to religion that ourphenomenology of globalization allow us toarticulate has to do with the lsquode-transcenden-talizing of othernessrsquo or what I also wouldlike to call the lsquoroutinization of othernessrsquoThere is a correlation between the wayhumanity has conceptualized otherness met-aphysically and conceptually on the onehand and humanityrsquos relationship to real andconcrete otherness as it has been experiencedexistentially and phenomenologically on theother hand This correlation has been medi-ated by humanityrsquos decreasing ruralism Inother words the less rural and thus the moreurban dwelling humans have become theless other is the otherness that we can thinkof or dream up The suggestion is that themetaphysics of alterity that has guided somuch of Western theology and religiousthinking over the last 2000 years has beendetermined by a particular asymmetrybetween the country and the city For thelongest history of humanity most societieshave been farming and rural-dwelling com-munities and associations Contact betweenextremely different communities and societ-ies was sporadic and rare and when contact

did occurred this was meditated by citydwellers and the long memory of popularmythologies But as was noted above in thedawning 21st century most humans will becity dwellers Furthermore In the 21st cen-tury most humanity will be conglomerated inthe mega-urbes of the Third World Underthis circumstance the holy other the abso-lutely other will be deflated Alterity and theextraordinary what can also be called thetremendum are de-mystified and de-met-aphysicalized (Habermas 1992 Placher1996) Either everyone will be a stranger orno one will be because we will all bestrangers in a city of strangers In such asituation otherness will have become a rou-tine an un-extra-ordinary event How thenare we to think divine alterity the othernessof the holy in a situation in which onto-logically and metaphysically all alterity hasbeen deflated demoted rendered normallevelled to the cotidian Are we in a situationof having to ldquorisk a new idea of holinessrdquo asBarry Taylor Pastor at the Sanctuary Churchin Santa Monica put it This would have tobe a holiness which is not other worldly buta holiness which is about the difference anduniqueness of others those who are oureveryday other with whom we ride thesubway with whom we walk the streets ofpopulated mega-urbes of the new age withwhom we share in anonymity the crowdedspaces of the new cities The real andmetaphorical wilderness of the world of itsjungles and forests of its undiscovered con-tinents and untamed seas of its unmappeddeserts and unnavigated rivers were excusesas well instigations to go searching for godbeyond the familial the urbane the too closeand already lsquodomesticatedrsquo God was beyondthe world other than the world Now thequestion is how do we discover the other inthe mundane difference of every fellowhuman being and the crowded city ofstrangers

The second challenge has to do with thecity as locus of the culture of consumptionas the site for an ethos of immediacyhedonism and hyper-excitation Sassen

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 21

speaks of the city as the crossroads of aconfrontation between the flows of capitaland the flows of peoples One of the waysthese flows clash in cities is through theconfrontation between cultures that isbetween different modalities of life Themore people become urban dwellers themore people are exposed to the cornucopiaof cultural possibilities It is not just thatmore people are in cities it is also that morepeople are seeking to participate in thestandards of life promised by urban dwellingThe challenges are unprecedented We arepresently choking in our own refuse in ourown garbage The psychological toil mustalso be unprecedented The level of unmetexpectations unfilled desires the gapbetween universally promised but exorbi-tantly expensive commodities that shatteredself-images and worth and that are availableto a relatively small fraction of the worldpopulation has grown exponentially Thereis another underside to the city as thecrossroads of the clash of modalities of lifeThe more cities grow the more they exerttheir pull on the so-called hinterland therural areas The more agriculture is mecha-nized and industrialized the more we adoptbiotechnology the more superfluous ldquofarm-ersrdquo become At the same time the expansionof telecommunications television and paidfor television and satellite connections havemade it easier to link up and peer into theldquotube of plentyrdquo to use that wonderfulphrase by Erik Barnouw (1990 [1975]) Thecity literally and metaphorically consumes itshinterland its outlying areas of supply itconsumes its resources and produce but alsoits cultures and its peoples

It is perhaps unnecessary to underscoreagain that most of the consumption of ruralresources is taking place in the metropolisesof the so-called First World So not onlymust we address the rampant and rapaciousconsumerism of cities in general but also theparticularly scandalous and grotesque asym-metry between the consumption of FirstWorld cities and Third World cities Thisissue becomes particularly pressing when in

the so-called advanced nations of the worldwe have thinkers intellectuals and criticstalking about a politics and culture of inclu-sion and tolerance (Habermas 1998) Thispolitics of inclusion is articulated with thebest intentions in mind The assumptionguiding it is that people throughout theworld would be better if they could partici-pate more equitably in the same kinds of so-called basic needs and luxuries that wewesterners enjoy But there is somethingprofoundly disingenuous and deleteriouslynaotildeve about such a view In some cases thepoverty of those across the world to whomwe would like to extend our standard ofliving is due precisely to our luxury Thatwhich we want to share is the cause of theprivation we want to alleviate Thus perhapsthe agenda should not be one of inclusionbut of dismantling the system that occa-sioned in the first place the exclusions webenefited and continue to benefit from

In this situation then the challengebecomes how to think of an urban culture offrugality The challenge is how to translatethe religious message and teaching of povertyas a holy way as a holy calling into a secularvalue a secular calling Another way ofputting it would be how do we translate thevisions of the desert fathers St Francis ofAssisi Mohandas Gandhi into an urbanvision for a spiritually starving youth Oralternatively if we think of what ArnoldToynbee and Eric Hobsbawn said about the20th century namely that its greatestachievement was the expansion of the middleclass then the goal for the 21st centuryshould be the expansion of a globalizedldquoliving level classrdquo In other words we haveto develop a culture for which the greatestachievement is not that everyone else will livelike us but that we will live at the level thatallows the most people to share in the mostfundamental goods potable water clean airinfant nutrition to sustain healthy standardsof unstunted growth and the possibility ofbasic education Here I would have to saythat I concur with Hardt and Negri on theircanonization of Assisi as a saint in the

22 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

hagiography of revolutionary militancy(2000 p 413)

The third challenge that our phenomenol-ogy of globalization allows us to elucidate hasto do with one of its central locus of analysisnamely the city If cities have become the siteswhere the unbundling of the state takes placethat is if we take cities to be the sites for thede-nationalizing of the national and if we atthe same time take the city as the locus of anemergent juridification or process of legal-ization of new forms of relationships then arewe not in need of having to re-think therelationship between the legal and politicalstructures of the emergent supra-nationalstate and the para- or extra-statist ldquochurchrdquoAnother way of putting it would be to notethat the church at least in the West antecedesthe modern nation-state In fact the churchwas the state and that partly because of thisthe quest for modernity the process ofmodernization entailed a secularization ofstate and legal structures In the process thechurchrsquos sphere of operation becamerestricted or constrained by the spaces drawnby the boundaries of nation-states Churchesand denominations became identified withnational boundaries which took place not-withstanding the underlying and fundamentaluniversalist thrust of Christianity If weaccept Sassenrsquos analysis which we must giventhe overwhelming evidence then we areinescapably put in the situation of having tore-think the relationship between the churchand the state In fact as the nation-states of the19th and 20th century are unbundled andnew forms of political and legal rights emergein de-territorialized and de-nationalizedforms of political self-determination then thechurch itself will have to face its de-national-ization and de-territorialization At the sametime however one of the fundamental condi-tions of the presence of the church in the 21stcentury will have to be that it must havelearned the lessons of the last 500 years ofcolonialism imperialism and post-colonial-ism This means that the challenge is dual Onthe one hand the new church must find aplace beyond the nation-states of political

modernity but on the other hand it must doso with a post-colonialist and post-imperialistattitude In the age of global transformationsthe new church cannot and will not be able toserve as an agent of globalization for the newimperial masters that began to profile them-selves in the horizon namely a united front ofEuropean nations (an expanded NATO) atechnological elite bent on re-designingnature and a cosmopolitan nobility withoutcontrols allegiances or consciences

Fourth and finally I think that anotherextremely important challenge has to do withthe insight that cities are the places wherecultures come to cultivate each other Inother words cities are the places where oldcultures are cannibalized but also carniv-alized where old cultures which are dyingcome to be renewed but also where newcultures are produced from the remains ofold ones (Hamacher 1997) Cities are germi-nals of new cultures Indeed just as we arevery likely to find micro-climates in mostglobal cities we are likely to find culturalenclaves little Italys Chinatowns Japan-towns little Bombays etc These places arewhere the centripetal and centrifugal forcesof homogenization and heterogenizationinteract to produce new cultural formationsUnderlying this new cultural genesis is itsevident and almost presentist character Theprocesses of cultural genesis take place rightin front of our eyes Cultures are notmillennial sedimentations and even thatwhich is peddled as the oldest is a present-day version of the old Most importantlycultures have become something we produceand choose cultures are something which weeither nurture and preserve or abandon anddisavow In all of these cases we are notpassive but active agents of transformationIn this situation the challenge for the newchurch for an urban ministry for the 21stcentury is how to develop an ecclesiology ofcultural diversity How will the new churchparticipate in this cultural genesis that isgerminating in global cities while retaining asense of identity Or conversely how will itretain a sense of cultural identity without

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 23

becoming either ethnocentric or jingoisticabout its cultural bequest without contribut-ing to the ossification of its own culture Onwhat terms can the new church participate inthe creation of new cultures and the preser-vation of successful ones

Conclusion

Cities are the vortex of the convergence ofthe processes of globalization and local-ization Cities are epitomes of glocalizationto use Robertsonrsquos language (1994) They arealso sites of the sedimentation of history Inthis essay I have sough to advance theresearch agenda that would take the ldquoinvisi-ble citiesrdquo of the so-called Third World astheir primary object of analysis At the sametime however I have urged that we look atthe cities in the developed industrializedworld through the eyes of their invisibleinhabitants and citizens immigrants ethnicminorities disenfranchised groups workerswomen and the youth There are invisiblecities within the cities that are so visible inmost urban theory and analysis as well asinvisible cities that remain unseen becausethey are not on the horizon of the academicagendas of researchers in the universities ofthe developed world

In tandem I have suspended judgementon whether to be for or against global-ization not because I do not think that wecan make moral judgments in this case butbecause I think we need to broaden ouranalyses of this new order of things Ideveloped some general points of departurefor a phenomenological analysis of global-ization This particular approach I thinkexhibits how ldquoglobalizationrdquo can and oughtto become a matter for serious philosophicalreflection I have identified the issues ofalterity temporality tradition the distinc-tion between the natural and the syntheticas philosophemes that are substantivelyimpacted by the processes of globalizationYet the phenomenological approach Iarticulate is deliberate in assuming a partic-

ular perspective or angle of approach I havesought to delineate a phenomenology ofglobalization from below The world doesnot disclose itself in the same way to allsubjects much less globalization Thus thephenomenology here presented urges us tolook at the world from below from theperspective of those who seem to be moreadversely than beneficially affected by theprocesses that make up globalization

This is what the ldquobelowrdquo in the subtitle ofthe essay pointed to the below of the poorand destitute the below of those who are notseen and do not register in the radar of socialtheory Furthermore I have tried to furtherqualify that perspective from below byfocusing my attention on the issue of reli-gion Religion clearly can mean manythings but at the very least it means ldquothe sighof the oppressedrdquo and the ldquoencyclopediccompendiumrdquo of a heartless world as Marxput it (1994 p 28) if only because it is theform in which the destitute the most vulner-able in our world express their critiques aswell as hopes I have argued that we ought tolook at cities as germinals of new culturesand that if we want to trace the emergentcultures of those ldquobelowrdquo then we betterlook at religious movements In what waysare the religious language of the oppressedand disenfranchised of the invisible cities ofglobalization critiques and resistances toglobalization This is clearly a researchdesideratum rather than a description oreven assessment

Note

1 I want to thank Bob Catterall for encouraging me towrite this article and for his comments on earlyversions of it I also want to thank Lois AnnLorentzen and Nelson Maldonado Torres who readit with great care and made substantive suggestionscorrections and criticisms that have made meunderstand better my own project I also want tothank Enrique Dussel Jurgen Habermas WalterMignolo and Santiago Castro-Gomez with whom Ihave discussed many of the ideas here developedand who have given me impetus to continue alongthis line with their own pioneering works

24 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Bibliography

Adorno TW (1984) lsquoThe idea of natural historyrsquo Telos60 pp 31ndash42

Amin S (1996) Capitalism in the Age of GlobalizationThe Management of Contemporary Society Londonand New York Zed Books

Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large CulturalDimensions of Globalization MinneapolisUniversity of Minnesota Press

Appiah KA (1992) In My Fatherrsquos House Africa in thePhilosophy of Culture New York Oxford UniversityPress

Aronowitz S (2000) The Knowledge FactoryDismantling the Corporate University and CreatingTrue Higher Learning Boston Beacon Press

Barber BR (1995) Jihad vs McWorld How Globalismand Tribalism are Reshaping the World New YorkBallantine Books

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1993) lsquoA globalizingeconomy some implications and consequencesrsquo inB Mazlish and R Buultjens (eds) ConceptualizingGlobal History pp 153ndash172 Boulder COWestview Press

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1994) Global DreamsImperial Corporations and the New World OrderNew York Simon amp Schuster

Barnouw E (1990 [1975]) Tube of Plenty TheEvolution of American Television New YorkOxford University Press

Baudrillard J (1981) For a Critique of the PoliticalEconomy of the Sign St Louis MO Telos Press

Bauman Z (1998a) Globalization The HumanConsequences New York Columbia UniversityPress

Bauman Z (1998b) lsquoPostmodern religionrsquo in P Heelas(ed) Religion Modernity and PostmodernityCambridge Blackwell

Beck U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung Frankfurt amMain Suhrkamp

Bell D (1976) The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism New York Basic Books

Benford G (1999) Deep Time How HumanityCommunicates Across Millenia New York AvonBooks Inc

Beyer P (1994) Religion and Globalization LondonSage

Brahm Jr G and Driscoll M (eds) (1995) ProstheticTerritories Politics and Hypertechnologies BoulderCO Westview

Bretherton C and Ponton G (eds) (1996) GlobalPolitics An Introduction Cambridge Blackwell

Calvino I (1974) Invisible Cities New York HarcourtBrace Jovanovich

Casanova J (1994) Public Religions in the ModernWorld Chicago University of Chicago Press

Castells M (1996ndash8) The Information Age EconomySociety and Culture Vol 1 The Rise of the

Network Society Vol 2 The Power of Identity Vol3 End of Millenium Malden MA and OxfordBlackwell Publishers

Chaunu P (1974) Historie science sociale la dureelrsquoespace et lrsquohomme a lrsquoepoque moderne ParisSociete drsquoedition drsquoenseignement superieur

Clark RP (1997) The Global Imperative AnInterpretative History of the Spread of HumankindBoulder CO Westview Press

Costello P (1993) World Historians and Their GoalsTwentieth-century Answers to Modernism DeKalbNorthern Illinois University Press

Dawkins K (1997) Gene Wars The Politics ofBiotechnology New York Seven Stories Press

de Benoist A (1996) lsquoConfronting globalizationrsquo Telos108 pp 117ndash137

Dussel E (1998) Etica de la Liberacion en la edad deglobalizacion y de la exclusion Madrid EditorialTrotta

Elias N (1992) Time An Essay Cambridge MA BasilBlackwell

Featherstone M (1995) Undoing CultureGlobalization Postmodernism and Identity LondonSage Publications

Fritsche J (1999) Historical Destiny and NationalSocialism in Heideggerrsquos Being and Time Berkeleyand Los Angeles University of California Press

Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of SocietyCambridge Polity Press

Giddens A (1987) Social Theory and ModernSociology Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of ModernityCambridge Polity Press

Gray J (1998) False Dawn The Delusions of GlobalCapitalism London Granta Books

Grossberg L (1999) lsquoSpeculations and articulations ofglobalizationrsquo Polygraph 11 pp 11ndash48

Habermas J (1992) Postmetaphysical ThinkingPhilosophical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (1998) The Inclusion of the Other Studiesin Political Theory Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (2001) The Postnational ConstellationPolitical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Hall Sir Peter (1998) Cities in Civilization New YorkPantheon Books

Hamacher W (1997) lsquoOne 2 many multiculturalismsrsquoin H de Vries and S Weber (eds) ViolenceIdentity and Self-determination Stanford CAStanford University Press

Haraway D (1991) Simians Cyborgs and WomenThe Reinvention of Nature New York Routledge

Hardt M and Negri A (2000) Empire CambridgeMA Harvard University Press

Harvey D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity AnEnquiry into the Origins of Cultural ChangeCambridge MA Basil Blackwell

Hayles NK (1999) How we Became PosthumanVirtual Bodies in Cybernetics Literature and

20 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

The kind of phenomenology of globalizationthat I sketched above allows us to ask aboutthe kinds of challenges religion faces in anage of globalization For religion appears as aresource of images concepts traditions andpractices that can allow individuals andcommunities to deal with a world that ischanging around them by the hour (Robert-son and Garrett 1991 Luhmann 2000) Inthe new Unubersichtlichkeit [unsurveyabil-ity] of our global society religion appears ascompendium of intuitions that have not beenextinguished by the so-called process ofsecularization (Mendieta forthcoming a)Most importantly however religion cannotbe dismissed or derided because it is theprivileged if not the primary form in whichthe impoverished masses of the invisiblecities of the world (those cities to which Ipointed in the first part of this essay)articulate their hopes as well as critique theirworld

The first challenge to religion that ourphenomenology of globalization allow us toarticulate has to do with the lsquode-transcenden-talizing of othernessrsquo or what I also wouldlike to call the lsquoroutinization of othernessrsquoThere is a correlation between the wayhumanity has conceptualized otherness met-aphysically and conceptually on the onehand and humanityrsquos relationship to real andconcrete otherness as it has been experiencedexistentially and phenomenologically on theother hand This correlation has been medi-ated by humanityrsquos decreasing ruralism Inother words the less rural and thus the moreurban dwelling humans have become theless other is the otherness that we can thinkof or dream up The suggestion is that themetaphysics of alterity that has guided somuch of Western theology and religiousthinking over the last 2000 years has beendetermined by a particular asymmetrybetween the country and the city For thelongest history of humanity most societieshave been farming and rural-dwelling com-munities and associations Contact betweenextremely different communities and societ-ies was sporadic and rare and when contact

did occurred this was meditated by citydwellers and the long memory of popularmythologies But as was noted above in thedawning 21st century most humans will becity dwellers Furthermore In the 21st cen-tury most humanity will be conglomerated inthe mega-urbes of the Third World Underthis circumstance the holy other the abso-lutely other will be deflated Alterity and theextraordinary what can also be called thetremendum are de-mystified and de-met-aphysicalized (Habermas 1992 Placher1996) Either everyone will be a stranger orno one will be because we will all bestrangers in a city of strangers In such asituation otherness will have become a rou-tine an un-extra-ordinary event How thenare we to think divine alterity the othernessof the holy in a situation in which onto-logically and metaphysically all alterity hasbeen deflated demoted rendered normallevelled to the cotidian Are we in a situationof having to ldquorisk a new idea of holinessrdquo asBarry Taylor Pastor at the Sanctuary Churchin Santa Monica put it This would have tobe a holiness which is not other worldly buta holiness which is about the difference anduniqueness of others those who are oureveryday other with whom we ride thesubway with whom we walk the streets ofpopulated mega-urbes of the new age withwhom we share in anonymity the crowdedspaces of the new cities The real andmetaphorical wilderness of the world of itsjungles and forests of its undiscovered con-tinents and untamed seas of its unmappeddeserts and unnavigated rivers were excusesas well instigations to go searching for godbeyond the familial the urbane the too closeand already lsquodomesticatedrsquo God was beyondthe world other than the world Now thequestion is how do we discover the other inthe mundane difference of every fellowhuman being and the crowded city ofstrangers

The second challenge has to do with thecity as locus of the culture of consumptionas the site for an ethos of immediacyhedonism and hyper-excitation Sassen

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 21

speaks of the city as the crossroads of aconfrontation between the flows of capitaland the flows of peoples One of the waysthese flows clash in cities is through theconfrontation between cultures that isbetween different modalities of life Themore people become urban dwellers themore people are exposed to the cornucopiaof cultural possibilities It is not just thatmore people are in cities it is also that morepeople are seeking to participate in thestandards of life promised by urban dwellingThe challenges are unprecedented We arepresently choking in our own refuse in ourown garbage The psychological toil mustalso be unprecedented The level of unmetexpectations unfilled desires the gapbetween universally promised but exorbi-tantly expensive commodities that shatteredself-images and worth and that are availableto a relatively small fraction of the worldpopulation has grown exponentially Thereis another underside to the city as thecrossroads of the clash of modalities of lifeThe more cities grow the more they exerttheir pull on the so-called hinterland therural areas The more agriculture is mecha-nized and industrialized the more we adoptbiotechnology the more superfluous ldquofarm-ersrdquo become At the same time the expansionof telecommunications television and paidfor television and satellite connections havemade it easier to link up and peer into theldquotube of plentyrdquo to use that wonderfulphrase by Erik Barnouw (1990 [1975]) Thecity literally and metaphorically consumes itshinterland its outlying areas of supply itconsumes its resources and produce but alsoits cultures and its peoples

It is perhaps unnecessary to underscoreagain that most of the consumption of ruralresources is taking place in the metropolisesof the so-called First World So not onlymust we address the rampant and rapaciousconsumerism of cities in general but also theparticularly scandalous and grotesque asym-metry between the consumption of FirstWorld cities and Third World cities Thisissue becomes particularly pressing when in

the so-called advanced nations of the worldwe have thinkers intellectuals and criticstalking about a politics and culture of inclu-sion and tolerance (Habermas 1998) Thispolitics of inclusion is articulated with thebest intentions in mind The assumptionguiding it is that people throughout theworld would be better if they could partici-pate more equitably in the same kinds of so-called basic needs and luxuries that wewesterners enjoy But there is somethingprofoundly disingenuous and deleteriouslynaotildeve about such a view In some cases thepoverty of those across the world to whomwe would like to extend our standard ofliving is due precisely to our luxury Thatwhich we want to share is the cause of theprivation we want to alleviate Thus perhapsthe agenda should not be one of inclusionbut of dismantling the system that occa-sioned in the first place the exclusions webenefited and continue to benefit from

In this situation then the challengebecomes how to think of an urban culture offrugality The challenge is how to translatethe religious message and teaching of povertyas a holy way as a holy calling into a secularvalue a secular calling Another way ofputting it would be how do we translate thevisions of the desert fathers St Francis ofAssisi Mohandas Gandhi into an urbanvision for a spiritually starving youth Oralternatively if we think of what ArnoldToynbee and Eric Hobsbawn said about the20th century namely that its greatestachievement was the expansion of the middleclass then the goal for the 21st centuryshould be the expansion of a globalizedldquoliving level classrdquo In other words we haveto develop a culture for which the greatestachievement is not that everyone else will livelike us but that we will live at the level thatallows the most people to share in the mostfundamental goods potable water clean airinfant nutrition to sustain healthy standardsof unstunted growth and the possibility ofbasic education Here I would have to saythat I concur with Hardt and Negri on theircanonization of Assisi as a saint in the

22 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

hagiography of revolutionary militancy(2000 p 413)

The third challenge that our phenomenol-ogy of globalization allows us to elucidate hasto do with one of its central locus of analysisnamely the city If cities have become the siteswhere the unbundling of the state takes placethat is if we take cities to be the sites for thede-nationalizing of the national and if we atthe same time take the city as the locus of anemergent juridification or process of legal-ization of new forms of relationships then arewe not in need of having to re-think therelationship between the legal and politicalstructures of the emergent supra-nationalstate and the para- or extra-statist ldquochurchrdquoAnother way of putting it would be to notethat the church at least in the West antecedesthe modern nation-state In fact the churchwas the state and that partly because of thisthe quest for modernity the process ofmodernization entailed a secularization ofstate and legal structures In the process thechurchrsquos sphere of operation becamerestricted or constrained by the spaces drawnby the boundaries of nation-states Churchesand denominations became identified withnational boundaries which took place not-withstanding the underlying and fundamentaluniversalist thrust of Christianity If weaccept Sassenrsquos analysis which we must giventhe overwhelming evidence then we areinescapably put in the situation of having tore-think the relationship between the churchand the state In fact as the nation-states of the19th and 20th century are unbundled andnew forms of political and legal rights emergein de-territorialized and de-nationalizedforms of political self-determination then thechurch itself will have to face its de-national-ization and de-territorialization At the sametime however one of the fundamental condi-tions of the presence of the church in the 21stcentury will have to be that it must havelearned the lessons of the last 500 years ofcolonialism imperialism and post-colonial-ism This means that the challenge is dual Onthe one hand the new church must find aplace beyond the nation-states of political

modernity but on the other hand it must doso with a post-colonialist and post-imperialistattitude In the age of global transformationsthe new church cannot and will not be able toserve as an agent of globalization for the newimperial masters that began to profile them-selves in the horizon namely a united front ofEuropean nations (an expanded NATO) atechnological elite bent on re-designingnature and a cosmopolitan nobility withoutcontrols allegiances or consciences

Fourth and finally I think that anotherextremely important challenge has to do withthe insight that cities are the places wherecultures come to cultivate each other Inother words cities are the places where oldcultures are cannibalized but also carniv-alized where old cultures which are dyingcome to be renewed but also where newcultures are produced from the remains ofold ones (Hamacher 1997) Cities are germi-nals of new cultures Indeed just as we arevery likely to find micro-climates in mostglobal cities we are likely to find culturalenclaves little Italys Chinatowns Japan-towns little Bombays etc These places arewhere the centripetal and centrifugal forcesof homogenization and heterogenizationinteract to produce new cultural formationsUnderlying this new cultural genesis is itsevident and almost presentist character Theprocesses of cultural genesis take place rightin front of our eyes Cultures are notmillennial sedimentations and even thatwhich is peddled as the oldest is a present-day version of the old Most importantlycultures have become something we produceand choose cultures are something which weeither nurture and preserve or abandon anddisavow In all of these cases we are notpassive but active agents of transformationIn this situation the challenge for the newchurch for an urban ministry for the 21stcentury is how to develop an ecclesiology ofcultural diversity How will the new churchparticipate in this cultural genesis that isgerminating in global cities while retaining asense of identity Or conversely how will itretain a sense of cultural identity without

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 23

becoming either ethnocentric or jingoisticabout its cultural bequest without contribut-ing to the ossification of its own culture Onwhat terms can the new church participate inthe creation of new cultures and the preser-vation of successful ones

Conclusion

Cities are the vortex of the convergence ofthe processes of globalization and local-ization Cities are epitomes of glocalizationto use Robertsonrsquos language (1994) They arealso sites of the sedimentation of history Inthis essay I have sough to advance theresearch agenda that would take the ldquoinvisi-ble citiesrdquo of the so-called Third World astheir primary object of analysis At the sametime however I have urged that we look atthe cities in the developed industrializedworld through the eyes of their invisibleinhabitants and citizens immigrants ethnicminorities disenfranchised groups workerswomen and the youth There are invisiblecities within the cities that are so visible inmost urban theory and analysis as well asinvisible cities that remain unseen becausethey are not on the horizon of the academicagendas of researchers in the universities ofthe developed world

In tandem I have suspended judgementon whether to be for or against global-ization not because I do not think that wecan make moral judgments in this case butbecause I think we need to broaden ouranalyses of this new order of things Ideveloped some general points of departurefor a phenomenological analysis of global-ization This particular approach I thinkexhibits how ldquoglobalizationrdquo can and oughtto become a matter for serious philosophicalreflection I have identified the issues ofalterity temporality tradition the distinc-tion between the natural and the syntheticas philosophemes that are substantivelyimpacted by the processes of globalizationYet the phenomenological approach Iarticulate is deliberate in assuming a partic-

ular perspective or angle of approach I havesought to delineate a phenomenology ofglobalization from below The world doesnot disclose itself in the same way to allsubjects much less globalization Thus thephenomenology here presented urges us tolook at the world from below from theperspective of those who seem to be moreadversely than beneficially affected by theprocesses that make up globalization

This is what the ldquobelowrdquo in the subtitle ofthe essay pointed to the below of the poorand destitute the below of those who are notseen and do not register in the radar of socialtheory Furthermore I have tried to furtherqualify that perspective from below byfocusing my attention on the issue of reli-gion Religion clearly can mean manythings but at the very least it means ldquothe sighof the oppressedrdquo and the ldquoencyclopediccompendiumrdquo of a heartless world as Marxput it (1994 p 28) if only because it is theform in which the destitute the most vulner-able in our world express their critiques aswell as hopes I have argued that we ought tolook at cities as germinals of new culturesand that if we want to trace the emergentcultures of those ldquobelowrdquo then we betterlook at religious movements In what waysare the religious language of the oppressedand disenfranchised of the invisible cities ofglobalization critiques and resistances toglobalization This is clearly a researchdesideratum rather than a description oreven assessment

Note

1 I want to thank Bob Catterall for encouraging me towrite this article and for his comments on earlyversions of it I also want to thank Lois AnnLorentzen and Nelson Maldonado Torres who readit with great care and made substantive suggestionscorrections and criticisms that have made meunderstand better my own project I also want tothank Enrique Dussel Jurgen Habermas WalterMignolo and Santiago Castro-Gomez with whom Ihave discussed many of the ideas here developedand who have given me impetus to continue alongthis line with their own pioneering works

24 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Bibliography

Adorno TW (1984) lsquoThe idea of natural historyrsquo Telos60 pp 31ndash42

Amin S (1996) Capitalism in the Age of GlobalizationThe Management of Contemporary Society Londonand New York Zed Books

Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large CulturalDimensions of Globalization MinneapolisUniversity of Minnesota Press

Appiah KA (1992) In My Fatherrsquos House Africa in thePhilosophy of Culture New York Oxford UniversityPress

Aronowitz S (2000) The Knowledge FactoryDismantling the Corporate University and CreatingTrue Higher Learning Boston Beacon Press

Barber BR (1995) Jihad vs McWorld How Globalismand Tribalism are Reshaping the World New YorkBallantine Books

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1993) lsquoA globalizingeconomy some implications and consequencesrsquo inB Mazlish and R Buultjens (eds) ConceptualizingGlobal History pp 153ndash172 Boulder COWestview Press

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1994) Global DreamsImperial Corporations and the New World OrderNew York Simon amp Schuster

Barnouw E (1990 [1975]) Tube of Plenty TheEvolution of American Television New YorkOxford University Press

Baudrillard J (1981) For a Critique of the PoliticalEconomy of the Sign St Louis MO Telos Press

Bauman Z (1998a) Globalization The HumanConsequences New York Columbia UniversityPress

Bauman Z (1998b) lsquoPostmodern religionrsquo in P Heelas(ed) Religion Modernity and PostmodernityCambridge Blackwell

Beck U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung Frankfurt amMain Suhrkamp

Bell D (1976) The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism New York Basic Books

Benford G (1999) Deep Time How HumanityCommunicates Across Millenia New York AvonBooks Inc

Beyer P (1994) Religion and Globalization LondonSage

Brahm Jr G and Driscoll M (eds) (1995) ProstheticTerritories Politics and Hypertechnologies BoulderCO Westview

Bretherton C and Ponton G (eds) (1996) GlobalPolitics An Introduction Cambridge Blackwell

Calvino I (1974) Invisible Cities New York HarcourtBrace Jovanovich

Casanova J (1994) Public Religions in the ModernWorld Chicago University of Chicago Press

Castells M (1996ndash8) The Information Age EconomySociety and Culture Vol 1 The Rise of the

Network Society Vol 2 The Power of Identity Vol3 End of Millenium Malden MA and OxfordBlackwell Publishers

Chaunu P (1974) Historie science sociale la dureelrsquoespace et lrsquohomme a lrsquoepoque moderne ParisSociete drsquoedition drsquoenseignement superieur

Clark RP (1997) The Global Imperative AnInterpretative History of the Spread of HumankindBoulder CO Westview Press

Costello P (1993) World Historians and Their GoalsTwentieth-century Answers to Modernism DeKalbNorthern Illinois University Press

Dawkins K (1997) Gene Wars The Politics ofBiotechnology New York Seven Stories Press

de Benoist A (1996) lsquoConfronting globalizationrsquo Telos108 pp 117ndash137

Dussel E (1998) Etica de la Liberacion en la edad deglobalizacion y de la exclusion Madrid EditorialTrotta

Elias N (1992) Time An Essay Cambridge MA BasilBlackwell

Featherstone M (1995) Undoing CultureGlobalization Postmodernism and Identity LondonSage Publications

Fritsche J (1999) Historical Destiny and NationalSocialism in Heideggerrsquos Being and Time Berkeleyand Los Angeles University of California Press

Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of SocietyCambridge Polity Press

Giddens A (1987) Social Theory and ModernSociology Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of ModernityCambridge Polity Press

Gray J (1998) False Dawn The Delusions of GlobalCapitalism London Granta Books

Grossberg L (1999) lsquoSpeculations and articulations ofglobalizationrsquo Polygraph 11 pp 11ndash48

Habermas J (1992) Postmetaphysical ThinkingPhilosophical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (1998) The Inclusion of the Other Studiesin Political Theory Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (2001) The Postnational ConstellationPolitical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Hall Sir Peter (1998) Cities in Civilization New YorkPantheon Books

Hamacher W (1997) lsquoOne 2 many multiculturalismsrsquoin H de Vries and S Weber (eds) ViolenceIdentity and Self-determination Stanford CAStanford University Press

Haraway D (1991) Simians Cyborgs and WomenThe Reinvention of Nature New York Routledge

Hardt M and Negri A (2000) Empire CambridgeMA Harvard University Press

Harvey D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity AnEnquiry into the Origins of Cultural ChangeCambridge MA Basil Blackwell

Hayles NK (1999) How we Became PosthumanVirtual Bodies in Cybernetics Literature and

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 21

speaks of the city as the crossroads of aconfrontation between the flows of capitaland the flows of peoples One of the waysthese flows clash in cities is through theconfrontation between cultures that isbetween different modalities of life Themore people become urban dwellers themore people are exposed to the cornucopiaof cultural possibilities It is not just thatmore people are in cities it is also that morepeople are seeking to participate in thestandards of life promised by urban dwellingThe challenges are unprecedented We arepresently choking in our own refuse in ourown garbage The psychological toil mustalso be unprecedented The level of unmetexpectations unfilled desires the gapbetween universally promised but exorbi-tantly expensive commodities that shatteredself-images and worth and that are availableto a relatively small fraction of the worldpopulation has grown exponentially Thereis another underside to the city as thecrossroads of the clash of modalities of lifeThe more cities grow the more they exerttheir pull on the so-called hinterland therural areas The more agriculture is mecha-nized and industrialized the more we adoptbiotechnology the more superfluous ldquofarm-ersrdquo become At the same time the expansionof telecommunications television and paidfor television and satellite connections havemade it easier to link up and peer into theldquotube of plentyrdquo to use that wonderfulphrase by Erik Barnouw (1990 [1975]) Thecity literally and metaphorically consumes itshinterland its outlying areas of supply itconsumes its resources and produce but alsoits cultures and its peoples

It is perhaps unnecessary to underscoreagain that most of the consumption of ruralresources is taking place in the metropolisesof the so-called First World So not onlymust we address the rampant and rapaciousconsumerism of cities in general but also theparticularly scandalous and grotesque asym-metry between the consumption of FirstWorld cities and Third World cities Thisissue becomes particularly pressing when in

the so-called advanced nations of the worldwe have thinkers intellectuals and criticstalking about a politics and culture of inclu-sion and tolerance (Habermas 1998) Thispolitics of inclusion is articulated with thebest intentions in mind The assumptionguiding it is that people throughout theworld would be better if they could partici-pate more equitably in the same kinds of so-called basic needs and luxuries that wewesterners enjoy But there is somethingprofoundly disingenuous and deleteriouslynaotildeve about such a view In some cases thepoverty of those across the world to whomwe would like to extend our standard ofliving is due precisely to our luxury Thatwhich we want to share is the cause of theprivation we want to alleviate Thus perhapsthe agenda should not be one of inclusionbut of dismantling the system that occa-sioned in the first place the exclusions webenefited and continue to benefit from

In this situation then the challengebecomes how to think of an urban culture offrugality The challenge is how to translatethe religious message and teaching of povertyas a holy way as a holy calling into a secularvalue a secular calling Another way ofputting it would be how do we translate thevisions of the desert fathers St Francis ofAssisi Mohandas Gandhi into an urbanvision for a spiritually starving youth Oralternatively if we think of what ArnoldToynbee and Eric Hobsbawn said about the20th century namely that its greatestachievement was the expansion of the middleclass then the goal for the 21st centuryshould be the expansion of a globalizedldquoliving level classrdquo In other words we haveto develop a culture for which the greatestachievement is not that everyone else will livelike us but that we will live at the level thatallows the most people to share in the mostfundamental goods potable water clean airinfant nutrition to sustain healthy standardsof unstunted growth and the possibility ofbasic education Here I would have to saythat I concur with Hardt and Negri on theircanonization of Assisi as a saint in the

22 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

hagiography of revolutionary militancy(2000 p 413)

The third challenge that our phenomenol-ogy of globalization allows us to elucidate hasto do with one of its central locus of analysisnamely the city If cities have become the siteswhere the unbundling of the state takes placethat is if we take cities to be the sites for thede-nationalizing of the national and if we atthe same time take the city as the locus of anemergent juridification or process of legal-ization of new forms of relationships then arewe not in need of having to re-think therelationship between the legal and politicalstructures of the emergent supra-nationalstate and the para- or extra-statist ldquochurchrdquoAnother way of putting it would be to notethat the church at least in the West antecedesthe modern nation-state In fact the churchwas the state and that partly because of thisthe quest for modernity the process ofmodernization entailed a secularization ofstate and legal structures In the process thechurchrsquos sphere of operation becamerestricted or constrained by the spaces drawnby the boundaries of nation-states Churchesand denominations became identified withnational boundaries which took place not-withstanding the underlying and fundamentaluniversalist thrust of Christianity If weaccept Sassenrsquos analysis which we must giventhe overwhelming evidence then we areinescapably put in the situation of having tore-think the relationship between the churchand the state In fact as the nation-states of the19th and 20th century are unbundled andnew forms of political and legal rights emergein de-territorialized and de-nationalizedforms of political self-determination then thechurch itself will have to face its de-national-ization and de-territorialization At the sametime however one of the fundamental condi-tions of the presence of the church in the 21stcentury will have to be that it must havelearned the lessons of the last 500 years ofcolonialism imperialism and post-colonial-ism This means that the challenge is dual Onthe one hand the new church must find aplace beyond the nation-states of political

modernity but on the other hand it must doso with a post-colonialist and post-imperialistattitude In the age of global transformationsthe new church cannot and will not be able toserve as an agent of globalization for the newimperial masters that began to profile them-selves in the horizon namely a united front ofEuropean nations (an expanded NATO) atechnological elite bent on re-designingnature and a cosmopolitan nobility withoutcontrols allegiances or consciences

Fourth and finally I think that anotherextremely important challenge has to do withthe insight that cities are the places wherecultures come to cultivate each other Inother words cities are the places where oldcultures are cannibalized but also carniv-alized where old cultures which are dyingcome to be renewed but also where newcultures are produced from the remains ofold ones (Hamacher 1997) Cities are germi-nals of new cultures Indeed just as we arevery likely to find micro-climates in mostglobal cities we are likely to find culturalenclaves little Italys Chinatowns Japan-towns little Bombays etc These places arewhere the centripetal and centrifugal forcesof homogenization and heterogenizationinteract to produce new cultural formationsUnderlying this new cultural genesis is itsevident and almost presentist character Theprocesses of cultural genesis take place rightin front of our eyes Cultures are notmillennial sedimentations and even thatwhich is peddled as the oldest is a present-day version of the old Most importantlycultures have become something we produceand choose cultures are something which weeither nurture and preserve or abandon anddisavow In all of these cases we are notpassive but active agents of transformationIn this situation the challenge for the newchurch for an urban ministry for the 21stcentury is how to develop an ecclesiology ofcultural diversity How will the new churchparticipate in this cultural genesis that isgerminating in global cities while retaining asense of identity Or conversely how will itretain a sense of cultural identity without

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 23

becoming either ethnocentric or jingoisticabout its cultural bequest without contribut-ing to the ossification of its own culture Onwhat terms can the new church participate inthe creation of new cultures and the preser-vation of successful ones

Conclusion

Cities are the vortex of the convergence ofthe processes of globalization and local-ization Cities are epitomes of glocalizationto use Robertsonrsquos language (1994) They arealso sites of the sedimentation of history Inthis essay I have sough to advance theresearch agenda that would take the ldquoinvisi-ble citiesrdquo of the so-called Third World astheir primary object of analysis At the sametime however I have urged that we look atthe cities in the developed industrializedworld through the eyes of their invisibleinhabitants and citizens immigrants ethnicminorities disenfranchised groups workerswomen and the youth There are invisiblecities within the cities that are so visible inmost urban theory and analysis as well asinvisible cities that remain unseen becausethey are not on the horizon of the academicagendas of researchers in the universities ofthe developed world

In tandem I have suspended judgementon whether to be for or against global-ization not because I do not think that wecan make moral judgments in this case butbecause I think we need to broaden ouranalyses of this new order of things Ideveloped some general points of departurefor a phenomenological analysis of global-ization This particular approach I thinkexhibits how ldquoglobalizationrdquo can and oughtto become a matter for serious philosophicalreflection I have identified the issues ofalterity temporality tradition the distinc-tion between the natural and the syntheticas philosophemes that are substantivelyimpacted by the processes of globalizationYet the phenomenological approach Iarticulate is deliberate in assuming a partic-

ular perspective or angle of approach I havesought to delineate a phenomenology ofglobalization from below The world doesnot disclose itself in the same way to allsubjects much less globalization Thus thephenomenology here presented urges us tolook at the world from below from theperspective of those who seem to be moreadversely than beneficially affected by theprocesses that make up globalization

This is what the ldquobelowrdquo in the subtitle ofthe essay pointed to the below of the poorand destitute the below of those who are notseen and do not register in the radar of socialtheory Furthermore I have tried to furtherqualify that perspective from below byfocusing my attention on the issue of reli-gion Religion clearly can mean manythings but at the very least it means ldquothe sighof the oppressedrdquo and the ldquoencyclopediccompendiumrdquo of a heartless world as Marxput it (1994 p 28) if only because it is theform in which the destitute the most vulner-able in our world express their critiques aswell as hopes I have argued that we ought tolook at cities as germinals of new culturesand that if we want to trace the emergentcultures of those ldquobelowrdquo then we betterlook at religious movements In what waysare the religious language of the oppressedand disenfranchised of the invisible cities ofglobalization critiques and resistances toglobalization This is clearly a researchdesideratum rather than a description oreven assessment

Note

1 I want to thank Bob Catterall for encouraging me towrite this article and for his comments on earlyversions of it I also want to thank Lois AnnLorentzen and Nelson Maldonado Torres who readit with great care and made substantive suggestionscorrections and criticisms that have made meunderstand better my own project I also want tothank Enrique Dussel Jurgen Habermas WalterMignolo and Santiago Castro-Gomez with whom Ihave discussed many of the ideas here developedand who have given me impetus to continue alongthis line with their own pioneering works

24 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Bibliography

Adorno TW (1984) lsquoThe idea of natural historyrsquo Telos60 pp 31ndash42

Amin S (1996) Capitalism in the Age of GlobalizationThe Management of Contemporary Society Londonand New York Zed Books

Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large CulturalDimensions of Globalization MinneapolisUniversity of Minnesota Press

Appiah KA (1992) In My Fatherrsquos House Africa in thePhilosophy of Culture New York Oxford UniversityPress

Aronowitz S (2000) The Knowledge FactoryDismantling the Corporate University and CreatingTrue Higher Learning Boston Beacon Press

Barber BR (1995) Jihad vs McWorld How Globalismand Tribalism are Reshaping the World New YorkBallantine Books

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1993) lsquoA globalizingeconomy some implications and consequencesrsquo inB Mazlish and R Buultjens (eds) ConceptualizingGlobal History pp 153ndash172 Boulder COWestview Press

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1994) Global DreamsImperial Corporations and the New World OrderNew York Simon amp Schuster

Barnouw E (1990 [1975]) Tube of Plenty TheEvolution of American Television New YorkOxford University Press

Baudrillard J (1981) For a Critique of the PoliticalEconomy of the Sign St Louis MO Telos Press

Bauman Z (1998a) Globalization The HumanConsequences New York Columbia UniversityPress

Bauman Z (1998b) lsquoPostmodern religionrsquo in P Heelas(ed) Religion Modernity and PostmodernityCambridge Blackwell

Beck U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung Frankfurt amMain Suhrkamp

Bell D (1976) The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism New York Basic Books

Benford G (1999) Deep Time How HumanityCommunicates Across Millenia New York AvonBooks Inc

Beyer P (1994) Religion and Globalization LondonSage

Brahm Jr G and Driscoll M (eds) (1995) ProstheticTerritories Politics and Hypertechnologies BoulderCO Westview

Bretherton C and Ponton G (eds) (1996) GlobalPolitics An Introduction Cambridge Blackwell

Calvino I (1974) Invisible Cities New York HarcourtBrace Jovanovich

Casanova J (1994) Public Religions in the ModernWorld Chicago University of Chicago Press

Castells M (1996ndash8) The Information Age EconomySociety and Culture Vol 1 The Rise of the

Network Society Vol 2 The Power of Identity Vol3 End of Millenium Malden MA and OxfordBlackwell Publishers

Chaunu P (1974) Historie science sociale la dureelrsquoespace et lrsquohomme a lrsquoepoque moderne ParisSociete drsquoedition drsquoenseignement superieur

Clark RP (1997) The Global Imperative AnInterpretative History of the Spread of HumankindBoulder CO Westview Press

Costello P (1993) World Historians and Their GoalsTwentieth-century Answers to Modernism DeKalbNorthern Illinois University Press

Dawkins K (1997) Gene Wars The Politics ofBiotechnology New York Seven Stories Press

de Benoist A (1996) lsquoConfronting globalizationrsquo Telos108 pp 117ndash137

Dussel E (1998) Etica de la Liberacion en la edad deglobalizacion y de la exclusion Madrid EditorialTrotta

Elias N (1992) Time An Essay Cambridge MA BasilBlackwell

Featherstone M (1995) Undoing CultureGlobalization Postmodernism and Identity LondonSage Publications

Fritsche J (1999) Historical Destiny and NationalSocialism in Heideggerrsquos Being and Time Berkeleyand Los Angeles University of California Press

Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of SocietyCambridge Polity Press

Giddens A (1987) Social Theory and ModernSociology Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of ModernityCambridge Polity Press

Gray J (1998) False Dawn The Delusions of GlobalCapitalism London Granta Books

Grossberg L (1999) lsquoSpeculations and articulations ofglobalizationrsquo Polygraph 11 pp 11ndash48

Habermas J (1992) Postmetaphysical ThinkingPhilosophical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (1998) The Inclusion of the Other Studiesin Political Theory Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (2001) The Postnational ConstellationPolitical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Hall Sir Peter (1998) Cities in Civilization New YorkPantheon Books

Hamacher W (1997) lsquoOne 2 many multiculturalismsrsquoin H de Vries and S Weber (eds) ViolenceIdentity and Self-determination Stanford CAStanford University Press

Haraway D (1991) Simians Cyborgs and WomenThe Reinvention of Nature New York Routledge

Hardt M and Negri A (2000) Empire CambridgeMA Harvard University Press

Harvey D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity AnEnquiry into the Origins of Cultural ChangeCambridge MA Basil Blackwell

Hayles NK (1999) How we Became PosthumanVirtual Bodies in Cybernetics Literature and

22 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

hagiography of revolutionary militancy(2000 p 413)

The third challenge that our phenomenol-ogy of globalization allows us to elucidate hasto do with one of its central locus of analysisnamely the city If cities have become the siteswhere the unbundling of the state takes placethat is if we take cities to be the sites for thede-nationalizing of the national and if we atthe same time take the city as the locus of anemergent juridification or process of legal-ization of new forms of relationships then arewe not in need of having to re-think therelationship between the legal and politicalstructures of the emergent supra-nationalstate and the para- or extra-statist ldquochurchrdquoAnother way of putting it would be to notethat the church at least in the West antecedesthe modern nation-state In fact the churchwas the state and that partly because of thisthe quest for modernity the process ofmodernization entailed a secularization ofstate and legal structures In the process thechurchrsquos sphere of operation becamerestricted or constrained by the spaces drawnby the boundaries of nation-states Churchesand denominations became identified withnational boundaries which took place not-withstanding the underlying and fundamentaluniversalist thrust of Christianity If weaccept Sassenrsquos analysis which we must giventhe overwhelming evidence then we areinescapably put in the situation of having tore-think the relationship between the churchand the state In fact as the nation-states of the19th and 20th century are unbundled andnew forms of political and legal rights emergein de-territorialized and de-nationalizedforms of political self-determination then thechurch itself will have to face its de-national-ization and de-territorialization At the sametime however one of the fundamental condi-tions of the presence of the church in the 21stcentury will have to be that it must havelearned the lessons of the last 500 years ofcolonialism imperialism and post-colonial-ism This means that the challenge is dual Onthe one hand the new church must find aplace beyond the nation-states of political

modernity but on the other hand it must doso with a post-colonialist and post-imperialistattitude In the age of global transformationsthe new church cannot and will not be able toserve as an agent of globalization for the newimperial masters that began to profile them-selves in the horizon namely a united front ofEuropean nations (an expanded NATO) atechnological elite bent on re-designingnature and a cosmopolitan nobility withoutcontrols allegiances or consciences

Fourth and finally I think that anotherextremely important challenge has to do withthe insight that cities are the places wherecultures come to cultivate each other Inother words cities are the places where oldcultures are cannibalized but also carniv-alized where old cultures which are dyingcome to be renewed but also where newcultures are produced from the remains ofold ones (Hamacher 1997) Cities are germi-nals of new cultures Indeed just as we arevery likely to find micro-climates in mostglobal cities we are likely to find culturalenclaves little Italys Chinatowns Japan-towns little Bombays etc These places arewhere the centripetal and centrifugal forcesof homogenization and heterogenizationinteract to produce new cultural formationsUnderlying this new cultural genesis is itsevident and almost presentist character Theprocesses of cultural genesis take place rightin front of our eyes Cultures are notmillennial sedimentations and even thatwhich is peddled as the oldest is a present-day version of the old Most importantlycultures have become something we produceand choose cultures are something which weeither nurture and preserve or abandon anddisavow In all of these cases we are notpassive but active agents of transformationIn this situation the challenge for the newchurch for an urban ministry for the 21stcentury is how to develop an ecclesiology ofcultural diversity How will the new churchparticipate in this cultural genesis that isgerminating in global cities while retaining asense of identity Or conversely how will itretain a sense of cultural identity without

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 23

becoming either ethnocentric or jingoisticabout its cultural bequest without contribut-ing to the ossification of its own culture Onwhat terms can the new church participate inthe creation of new cultures and the preser-vation of successful ones

Conclusion

Cities are the vortex of the convergence ofthe processes of globalization and local-ization Cities are epitomes of glocalizationto use Robertsonrsquos language (1994) They arealso sites of the sedimentation of history Inthis essay I have sough to advance theresearch agenda that would take the ldquoinvisi-ble citiesrdquo of the so-called Third World astheir primary object of analysis At the sametime however I have urged that we look atthe cities in the developed industrializedworld through the eyes of their invisibleinhabitants and citizens immigrants ethnicminorities disenfranchised groups workerswomen and the youth There are invisiblecities within the cities that are so visible inmost urban theory and analysis as well asinvisible cities that remain unseen becausethey are not on the horizon of the academicagendas of researchers in the universities ofthe developed world

In tandem I have suspended judgementon whether to be for or against global-ization not because I do not think that wecan make moral judgments in this case butbecause I think we need to broaden ouranalyses of this new order of things Ideveloped some general points of departurefor a phenomenological analysis of global-ization This particular approach I thinkexhibits how ldquoglobalizationrdquo can and oughtto become a matter for serious philosophicalreflection I have identified the issues ofalterity temporality tradition the distinc-tion between the natural and the syntheticas philosophemes that are substantivelyimpacted by the processes of globalizationYet the phenomenological approach Iarticulate is deliberate in assuming a partic-

ular perspective or angle of approach I havesought to delineate a phenomenology ofglobalization from below The world doesnot disclose itself in the same way to allsubjects much less globalization Thus thephenomenology here presented urges us tolook at the world from below from theperspective of those who seem to be moreadversely than beneficially affected by theprocesses that make up globalization

This is what the ldquobelowrdquo in the subtitle ofthe essay pointed to the below of the poorand destitute the below of those who are notseen and do not register in the radar of socialtheory Furthermore I have tried to furtherqualify that perspective from below byfocusing my attention on the issue of reli-gion Religion clearly can mean manythings but at the very least it means ldquothe sighof the oppressedrdquo and the ldquoencyclopediccompendiumrdquo of a heartless world as Marxput it (1994 p 28) if only because it is theform in which the destitute the most vulner-able in our world express their critiques aswell as hopes I have argued that we ought tolook at cities as germinals of new culturesand that if we want to trace the emergentcultures of those ldquobelowrdquo then we betterlook at religious movements In what waysare the religious language of the oppressedand disenfranchised of the invisible cities ofglobalization critiques and resistances toglobalization This is clearly a researchdesideratum rather than a description oreven assessment

Note

1 I want to thank Bob Catterall for encouraging me towrite this article and for his comments on earlyversions of it I also want to thank Lois AnnLorentzen and Nelson Maldonado Torres who readit with great care and made substantive suggestionscorrections and criticisms that have made meunderstand better my own project I also want tothank Enrique Dussel Jurgen Habermas WalterMignolo and Santiago Castro-Gomez with whom Ihave discussed many of the ideas here developedand who have given me impetus to continue alongthis line with their own pioneering works

24 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Bibliography

Adorno TW (1984) lsquoThe idea of natural historyrsquo Telos60 pp 31ndash42

Amin S (1996) Capitalism in the Age of GlobalizationThe Management of Contemporary Society Londonand New York Zed Books

Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large CulturalDimensions of Globalization MinneapolisUniversity of Minnesota Press

Appiah KA (1992) In My Fatherrsquos House Africa in thePhilosophy of Culture New York Oxford UniversityPress

Aronowitz S (2000) The Knowledge FactoryDismantling the Corporate University and CreatingTrue Higher Learning Boston Beacon Press

Barber BR (1995) Jihad vs McWorld How Globalismand Tribalism are Reshaping the World New YorkBallantine Books

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1993) lsquoA globalizingeconomy some implications and consequencesrsquo inB Mazlish and R Buultjens (eds) ConceptualizingGlobal History pp 153ndash172 Boulder COWestview Press

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1994) Global DreamsImperial Corporations and the New World OrderNew York Simon amp Schuster

Barnouw E (1990 [1975]) Tube of Plenty TheEvolution of American Television New YorkOxford University Press

Baudrillard J (1981) For a Critique of the PoliticalEconomy of the Sign St Louis MO Telos Press

Bauman Z (1998a) Globalization The HumanConsequences New York Columbia UniversityPress

Bauman Z (1998b) lsquoPostmodern religionrsquo in P Heelas(ed) Religion Modernity and PostmodernityCambridge Blackwell

Beck U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung Frankfurt amMain Suhrkamp

Bell D (1976) The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism New York Basic Books

Benford G (1999) Deep Time How HumanityCommunicates Across Millenia New York AvonBooks Inc

Beyer P (1994) Religion and Globalization LondonSage

Brahm Jr G and Driscoll M (eds) (1995) ProstheticTerritories Politics and Hypertechnologies BoulderCO Westview

Bretherton C and Ponton G (eds) (1996) GlobalPolitics An Introduction Cambridge Blackwell

Calvino I (1974) Invisible Cities New York HarcourtBrace Jovanovich

Casanova J (1994) Public Religions in the ModernWorld Chicago University of Chicago Press

Castells M (1996ndash8) The Information Age EconomySociety and Culture Vol 1 The Rise of the

Network Society Vol 2 The Power of Identity Vol3 End of Millenium Malden MA and OxfordBlackwell Publishers

Chaunu P (1974) Historie science sociale la dureelrsquoespace et lrsquohomme a lrsquoepoque moderne ParisSociete drsquoedition drsquoenseignement superieur

Clark RP (1997) The Global Imperative AnInterpretative History of the Spread of HumankindBoulder CO Westview Press

Costello P (1993) World Historians and Their GoalsTwentieth-century Answers to Modernism DeKalbNorthern Illinois University Press

Dawkins K (1997) Gene Wars The Politics ofBiotechnology New York Seven Stories Press

de Benoist A (1996) lsquoConfronting globalizationrsquo Telos108 pp 117ndash137

Dussel E (1998) Etica de la Liberacion en la edad deglobalizacion y de la exclusion Madrid EditorialTrotta

Elias N (1992) Time An Essay Cambridge MA BasilBlackwell

Featherstone M (1995) Undoing CultureGlobalization Postmodernism and Identity LondonSage Publications

Fritsche J (1999) Historical Destiny and NationalSocialism in Heideggerrsquos Being and Time Berkeleyand Los Angeles University of California Press

Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of SocietyCambridge Polity Press

Giddens A (1987) Social Theory and ModernSociology Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of ModernityCambridge Polity Press

Gray J (1998) False Dawn The Delusions of GlobalCapitalism London Granta Books

Grossberg L (1999) lsquoSpeculations and articulations ofglobalizationrsquo Polygraph 11 pp 11ndash48

Habermas J (1992) Postmetaphysical ThinkingPhilosophical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (1998) The Inclusion of the Other Studiesin Political Theory Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (2001) The Postnational ConstellationPolitical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Hall Sir Peter (1998) Cities in Civilization New YorkPantheon Books

Hamacher W (1997) lsquoOne 2 many multiculturalismsrsquoin H de Vries and S Weber (eds) ViolenceIdentity and Self-determination Stanford CAStanford University Press

Haraway D (1991) Simians Cyborgs and WomenThe Reinvention of Nature New York Routledge

Hardt M and Negri A (2000) Empire CambridgeMA Harvard University Press

Harvey D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity AnEnquiry into the Origins of Cultural ChangeCambridge MA Basil Blackwell

Hayles NK (1999) How we Became PosthumanVirtual Bodies in Cybernetics Literature and

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 23

becoming either ethnocentric or jingoisticabout its cultural bequest without contribut-ing to the ossification of its own culture Onwhat terms can the new church participate inthe creation of new cultures and the preser-vation of successful ones

Conclusion

Cities are the vortex of the convergence ofthe processes of globalization and local-ization Cities are epitomes of glocalizationto use Robertsonrsquos language (1994) They arealso sites of the sedimentation of history Inthis essay I have sough to advance theresearch agenda that would take the ldquoinvisi-ble citiesrdquo of the so-called Third World astheir primary object of analysis At the sametime however I have urged that we look atthe cities in the developed industrializedworld through the eyes of their invisibleinhabitants and citizens immigrants ethnicminorities disenfranchised groups workerswomen and the youth There are invisiblecities within the cities that are so visible inmost urban theory and analysis as well asinvisible cities that remain unseen becausethey are not on the horizon of the academicagendas of researchers in the universities ofthe developed world

In tandem I have suspended judgementon whether to be for or against global-ization not because I do not think that wecan make moral judgments in this case butbecause I think we need to broaden ouranalyses of this new order of things Ideveloped some general points of departurefor a phenomenological analysis of global-ization This particular approach I thinkexhibits how ldquoglobalizationrdquo can and oughtto become a matter for serious philosophicalreflection I have identified the issues ofalterity temporality tradition the distinc-tion between the natural and the syntheticas philosophemes that are substantivelyimpacted by the processes of globalizationYet the phenomenological approach Iarticulate is deliberate in assuming a partic-

ular perspective or angle of approach I havesought to delineate a phenomenology ofglobalization from below The world doesnot disclose itself in the same way to allsubjects much less globalization Thus thephenomenology here presented urges us tolook at the world from below from theperspective of those who seem to be moreadversely than beneficially affected by theprocesses that make up globalization

This is what the ldquobelowrdquo in the subtitle ofthe essay pointed to the below of the poorand destitute the below of those who are notseen and do not register in the radar of socialtheory Furthermore I have tried to furtherqualify that perspective from below byfocusing my attention on the issue of reli-gion Religion clearly can mean manythings but at the very least it means ldquothe sighof the oppressedrdquo and the ldquoencyclopediccompendiumrdquo of a heartless world as Marxput it (1994 p 28) if only because it is theform in which the destitute the most vulner-able in our world express their critiques aswell as hopes I have argued that we ought tolook at cities as germinals of new culturesand that if we want to trace the emergentcultures of those ldquobelowrdquo then we betterlook at religious movements In what waysare the religious language of the oppressedand disenfranchised of the invisible cities ofglobalization critiques and resistances toglobalization This is clearly a researchdesideratum rather than a description oreven assessment

Note

1 I want to thank Bob Catterall for encouraging me towrite this article and for his comments on earlyversions of it I also want to thank Lois AnnLorentzen and Nelson Maldonado Torres who readit with great care and made substantive suggestionscorrections and criticisms that have made meunderstand better my own project I also want tothank Enrique Dussel Jurgen Habermas WalterMignolo and Santiago Castro-Gomez with whom Ihave discussed many of the ideas here developedand who have given me impetus to continue alongthis line with their own pioneering works

24 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Bibliography

Adorno TW (1984) lsquoThe idea of natural historyrsquo Telos60 pp 31ndash42

Amin S (1996) Capitalism in the Age of GlobalizationThe Management of Contemporary Society Londonand New York Zed Books

Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large CulturalDimensions of Globalization MinneapolisUniversity of Minnesota Press

Appiah KA (1992) In My Fatherrsquos House Africa in thePhilosophy of Culture New York Oxford UniversityPress

Aronowitz S (2000) The Knowledge FactoryDismantling the Corporate University and CreatingTrue Higher Learning Boston Beacon Press

Barber BR (1995) Jihad vs McWorld How Globalismand Tribalism are Reshaping the World New YorkBallantine Books

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1993) lsquoA globalizingeconomy some implications and consequencesrsquo inB Mazlish and R Buultjens (eds) ConceptualizingGlobal History pp 153ndash172 Boulder COWestview Press

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1994) Global DreamsImperial Corporations and the New World OrderNew York Simon amp Schuster

Barnouw E (1990 [1975]) Tube of Plenty TheEvolution of American Television New YorkOxford University Press

Baudrillard J (1981) For a Critique of the PoliticalEconomy of the Sign St Louis MO Telos Press

Bauman Z (1998a) Globalization The HumanConsequences New York Columbia UniversityPress

Bauman Z (1998b) lsquoPostmodern religionrsquo in P Heelas(ed) Religion Modernity and PostmodernityCambridge Blackwell

Beck U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung Frankfurt amMain Suhrkamp

Bell D (1976) The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism New York Basic Books

Benford G (1999) Deep Time How HumanityCommunicates Across Millenia New York AvonBooks Inc

Beyer P (1994) Religion and Globalization LondonSage

Brahm Jr G and Driscoll M (eds) (1995) ProstheticTerritories Politics and Hypertechnologies BoulderCO Westview

Bretherton C and Ponton G (eds) (1996) GlobalPolitics An Introduction Cambridge Blackwell

Calvino I (1974) Invisible Cities New York HarcourtBrace Jovanovich

Casanova J (1994) Public Religions in the ModernWorld Chicago University of Chicago Press

Castells M (1996ndash8) The Information Age EconomySociety and Culture Vol 1 The Rise of the

Network Society Vol 2 The Power of Identity Vol3 End of Millenium Malden MA and OxfordBlackwell Publishers

Chaunu P (1974) Historie science sociale la dureelrsquoespace et lrsquohomme a lrsquoepoque moderne ParisSociete drsquoedition drsquoenseignement superieur

Clark RP (1997) The Global Imperative AnInterpretative History of the Spread of HumankindBoulder CO Westview Press

Costello P (1993) World Historians and Their GoalsTwentieth-century Answers to Modernism DeKalbNorthern Illinois University Press

Dawkins K (1997) Gene Wars The Politics ofBiotechnology New York Seven Stories Press

de Benoist A (1996) lsquoConfronting globalizationrsquo Telos108 pp 117ndash137

Dussel E (1998) Etica de la Liberacion en la edad deglobalizacion y de la exclusion Madrid EditorialTrotta

Elias N (1992) Time An Essay Cambridge MA BasilBlackwell

Featherstone M (1995) Undoing CultureGlobalization Postmodernism and Identity LondonSage Publications

Fritsche J (1999) Historical Destiny and NationalSocialism in Heideggerrsquos Being and Time Berkeleyand Los Angeles University of California Press

Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of SocietyCambridge Polity Press

Giddens A (1987) Social Theory and ModernSociology Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of ModernityCambridge Polity Press

Gray J (1998) False Dawn The Delusions of GlobalCapitalism London Granta Books

Grossberg L (1999) lsquoSpeculations and articulations ofglobalizationrsquo Polygraph 11 pp 11ndash48

Habermas J (1992) Postmetaphysical ThinkingPhilosophical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (1998) The Inclusion of the Other Studiesin Political Theory Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (2001) The Postnational ConstellationPolitical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Hall Sir Peter (1998) Cities in Civilization New YorkPantheon Books

Hamacher W (1997) lsquoOne 2 many multiculturalismsrsquoin H de Vries and S Weber (eds) ViolenceIdentity and Self-determination Stanford CAStanford University Press

Haraway D (1991) Simians Cyborgs and WomenThe Reinvention of Nature New York Routledge

Hardt M and Negri A (2000) Empire CambridgeMA Harvard University Press

Harvey D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity AnEnquiry into the Origins of Cultural ChangeCambridge MA Basil Blackwell

Hayles NK (1999) How we Became PosthumanVirtual Bodies in Cybernetics Literature and

24 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Bibliography

Adorno TW (1984) lsquoThe idea of natural historyrsquo Telos60 pp 31ndash42

Amin S (1996) Capitalism in the Age of GlobalizationThe Management of Contemporary Society Londonand New York Zed Books

Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large CulturalDimensions of Globalization MinneapolisUniversity of Minnesota Press

Appiah KA (1992) In My Fatherrsquos House Africa in thePhilosophy of Culture New York Oxford UniversityPress

Aronowitz S (2000) The Knowledge FactoryDismantling the Corporate University and CreatingTrue Higher Learning Boston Beacon Press

Barber BR (1995) Jihad vs McWorld How Globalismand Tribalism are Reshaping the World New YorkBallantine Books

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1993) lsquoA globalizingeconomy some implications and consequencesrsquo inB Mazlish and R Buultjens (eds) ConceptualizingGlobal History pp 153ndash172 Boulder COWestview Press

Barnet RJ and Cavanagh J (1994) Global DreamsImperial Corporations and the New World OrderNew York Simon amp Schuster

Barnouw E (1990 [1975]) Tube of Plenty TheEvolution of American Television New YorkOxford University Press

Baudrillard J (1981) For a Critique of the PoliticalEconomy of the Sign St Louis MO Telos Press

Bauman Z (1998a) Globalization The HumanConsequences New York Columbia UniversityPress

Bauman Z (1998b) lsquoPostmodern religionrsquo in P Heelas(ed) Religion Modernity and PostmodernityCambridge Blackwell

Beck U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung Frankfurt amMain Suhrkamp

Bell D (1976) The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism New York Basic Books

Benford G (1999) Deep Time How HumanityCommunicates Across Millenia New York AvonBooks Inc

Beyer P (1994) Religion and Globalization LondonSage

Brahm Jr G and Driscoll M (eds) (1995) ProstheticTerritories Politics and Hypertechnologies BoulderCO Westview

Bretherton C and Ponton G (eds) (1996) GlobalPolitics An Introduction Cambridge Blackwell

Calvino I (1974) Invisible Cities New York HarcourtBrace Jovanovich

Casanova J (1994) Public Religions in the ModernWorld Chicago University of Chicago Press

Castells M (1996ndash8) The Information Age EconomySociety and Culture Vol 1 The Rise of the

Network Society Vol 2 The Power of Identity Vol3 End of Millenium Malden MA and OxfordBlackwell Publishers

Chaunu P (1974) Historie science sociale la dureelrsquoespace et lrsquohomme a lrsquoepoque moderne ParisSociete drsquoedition drsquoenseignement superieur

Clark RP (1997) The Global Imperative AnInterpretative History of the Spread of HumankindBoulder CO Westview Press

Costello P (1993) World Historians and Their GoalsTwentieth-century Answers to Modernism DeKalbNorthern Illinois University Press

Dawkins K (1997) Gene Wars The Politics ofBiotechnology New York Seven Stories Press

de Benoist A (1996) lsquoConfronting globalizationrsquo Telos108 pp 117ndash137

Dussel E (1998) Etica de la Liberacion en la edad deglobalizacion y de la exclusion Madrid EditorialTrotta

Elias N (1992) Time An Essay Cambridge MA BasilBlackwell

Featherstone M (1995) Undoing CultureGlobalization Postmodernism and Identity LondonSage Publications

Fritsche J (1999) Historical Destiny and NationalSocialism in Heideggerrsquos Being and Time Berkeleyand Los Angeles University of California Press

Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of SocietyCambridge Polity Press

Giddens A (1987) Social Theory and ModernSociology Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of ModernityCambridge Polity Press

Gray J (1998) False Dawn The Delusions of GlobalCapitalism London Granta Books

Grossberg L (1999) lsquoSpeculations and articulations ofglobalizationrsquo Polygraph 11 pp 11ndash48

Habermas J (1992) Postmetaphysical ThinkingPhilosophical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (1998) The Inclusion of the Other Studiesin Political Theory Cambridge MA MIT Press

Habermas J (2001) The Postnational ConstellationPolitical Essays Cambridge MA MIT Press

Hall Sir Peter (1998) Cities in Civilization New YorkPantheon Books

Hamacher W (1997) lsquoOne 2 many multiculturalismsrsquoin H de Vries and S Weber (eds) ViolenceIdentity and Self-determination Stanford CAStanford University Press

Haraway D (1991) Simians Cyborgs and WomenThe Reinvention of Nature New York Routledge

Hardt M and Negri A (2000) Empire CambridgeMA Harvard University Press

Harvey D (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity AnEnquiry into the Origins of Cultural ChangeCambridge MA Basil Blackwell

Hayles NK (1999) How we Became PosthumanVirtual Bodies in Cybernetics Literature and

MENDIETA INVISIBLE CITIES 25

Informatics Chicago University of Chicago PressHeelas P Lash S and Morris P (eds) (1996)

Detraditionalization Critical Reflections onAuthority and Identity Cambridge MA Blackwell

Heidegger M (1977) The Question ConcerningTechnology and Other Essays New York Harper ampRow

Heidegger M (1992) The Concept of Time Oxford andCambridge MA Blackwell

Heidegger M (1996) Being and Time New York StateUniversity of New York Press

Held D and McGrew A (2000) The GlobalTransformations Reader An Introduction to theGlobalization Debate Cambridge Polity

Held D McGrew A Goldblatt D and Perraton J(1999) Global Transformations Politics Economicsand Culture Stanford CA Stanford UniversityPress

Hirst P and Thompson G (1996) Globalization inQuestion Oxford Polity Press

Hobsbawn E (1994) The Age of Extremes New YorkPantheon Books

Hodgson MGS (1993) Rethinking World HistoryEssays on Europe Islam and World HistoryCambridge Cambridge University Press

Hopkins DN et al (eds) (forthcoming)ReligionsGlobalizations Durham NC DukeUniversity Press

Jackson K (1985) Crabgrass Frontier TheSuburbanization of the United States New YorkOxford University Press

Jameson F (1998) lsquoNotes on globalization as aphilosophical issuersquo in F Jameson and M Miyoshi(eds) The Cultures of Globalization Durham NCDuke University Press

Jaspers K (1953) The Origin and Goal of HistoryNew Haven CT Yale University Press

Kennedy P (1993) Preparing for the Twenty-firstCentury New York Random House

Kenney M (1986) The University Industrial ComplexNew Haven CT Yale University Press

King AD (1990) Urbanism Colonialism and theWorld Economy Cultural and Spatial Foundationsof the World Urban System London Routledge

Kubler G (1962) The Shape of Time Remarks on theHistory of Things New Haven CT and LondonYale University Press

Laclau E (1996) Emancipation(s) London VersoLappe M and Bailey B (1998) Against the Grain

Biotechnology and the Corporate Takeover of YourFood Monroe MN Common Courage Press

Lasch C (1979) The Culture of Narcissism AmericanLife in an Age of Diminishing Expectations NewYork Warner Books

Lash S and Urry J (1994) Economies of Signs andSpaces London Sage

Lefebvre H (1969) Le droit a la ville Paris EditionsAnthropos

Lowe DM (1995) The Body in Late-capitalist USADurham NC Duke University Press

Luhmann N (1996) Funktion der Religion FrankfurtSuhrkamp

Luhmann N (2000) Die Religion der GesellschaftFrankfurt Suhrkamp

Luria DD and Rogers J (1999) Metro FuturesEconomic Solutions for Cities and their SuburbsBoston Beacon Press

Martin H-P and Schumann H (1997) The GlobalTrap Globalization amp Assault on Democracy ampProsperity London and New York Zed Books

Marty ME and Appleby RS (eds) (1991ndash95) TheFundamentalism Project 5 Vols ChicagoUniversity of Chicago Press

Marx K (1994) lsquoToward a critique of HegelrsquosPhilosophy of Right Introductionrsquo in K MarxSelected Writings Indianapolis and CambridgeHackett Publishing Company

Massey DS and Denton NA (1993) AmericanApartheid Segregation and the Making of theUnderclass Cambridge MA Harvard UniversityPress

Mazlish B and Buultjens R (1993) ConceptualizingGlobal History Boulder CO Westview Press

Mendieta E (forthcoming a) lsquoIntroductionrsquo in J Habermas(ed) Religion and Rationality Essays on Reason Godand Modernity Cambridge Polity Press

Mendieta E (forthcoming b) lsquoSocietyrsquos religion the riseof social theory globalization and the invention ofreligionrsquo in DN Hopkins et al (eds)ReligionsGlobalizations Durham NC DukeUniversity Press

Munch R (1998) Globale Dynamik lokaleLebenswelten Der schwierige Weg in dieWelgeschellschaft Frankfurt am Main Suhrkamp

National Geographic (1999) lsquoGlobal culturersquo AugustOrsquoMeara M (1999) Reinventing Cities for People and

the Planet Worldwatch Paper 147 JuneOrtega y Gasset J (1985) The Revolt of the Masses

Notre Dame University of Notre Dame PressPlacher WC (1996) The Domestication of

Transcendence How Modern Thinking about GodWent Wrong Louisville KY Westminster JohnKnow Press

Prakash G (ed) (1994) After Colonialism ImperialHistories and Postcolonial Displacements PrincetonNJ Princeton University Press

Ribeiro D (1972) The Americas and Civilization NewYork EP Dutton amp Co

Rifkin J (1998) The Biotech Century Harnessing theGene and Remaking the World New York JeremyP TarcherPutnam

Robertson R (1992) Globalization Social Theory andGlobal Culture London Sage

Robertson R (1994) lsquoGlobalisation or glocalisationrsquoThe Journal of International Communication 1 pp33ndash52

26 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Robertson R and Garrett WR (eds) (1991) Religionand Global Order Religion and the Political OrderNew York Paragon House

Rothenberg D (1993) Handrsquos End Technology and theLimits of Nature Berkeley University of CaliforniaPress

Sassen S (1991) The Global City New York LondonTokyo Princeton NJ Princeton University Press

Sassen S (1996) Losing Control Sovereignty in anAge of Globalization New York ColumbiaUniversity Press

Sassen S (1998) Globalization and its DiscontentsSelected Essays New York New Press

Sassen S (1999) Guests and Aliens New York NewPress

Sassen S (2000) Cities in a World Economy 2nd ednThousand Oaks CA Pine Forge Press

Scott A ed (1997) The Limits of Globalization NewYork Routledge

Sen A (1999) Development as Freedom New YorkAlfred A Knopf

Shiva V (1991) The Violence of the Green RevolutionThird World Agriculture Ecology and PoliticsLondon and New Jersey Zed Books

Shiva V (1993) Monocultures of the Mind Perspectiveson Biodiversity and Biotechnology London andNew York Zed Books

Shiva V (1997) Biopiracy The Plunder of Nature andKnowledge Boston MA South End Press

Shiva V (1999) Stolen Harverst The Hijacking of theGlobal Food Supply Cambridge MA South EndPress

Short JR Breitbach C Buckman S and Essex J(2000) lsquoFrom world cities to gateway citiesExtending the boundaries of globalization theoryrsquoCity Analysis of Urban Trends Culture TheoryPolicy Action 4 pp 317ndash340

Spybey T (1996) Globalization and World SocietyOxford Polity Press

Stackhouse M and Paris PJ (eds) (2000ndash1) God andGlobalization Vol 1 Religion and the Powers ofthe Common Life Vol 2 The Spirit and theModern Authorities Harrinsburg Trinity PressInternational

State of the Worldrsquos Cities (1999) Cities in a globalizingworldhttpwwwurbanobservatoryorgswc1999citieshtml

Turner BS (1983) Religion and Social Theory LondonSage

United Nations Development Programme (1998) HumanDevelopment Report 1998 New York OxfordUniversity Press

Veseth M (1998) Selling Globalization The Myth ofthe Global Economy Boulder CO and LondonLynne Rienner Publishers

Wallerstein I (1991) Unthinking Social Science TheLimits of Nineteenth-century ParadigmsCambridge Polity

Waters M (1995) Globalization New York RoutledgeWhite DW (1996) The American Century The Rise amp

Decline of the United States as a World PowerNew Haven CT and London Yale University Press

Whitehead AN (1925) Science and the ModernWorld New York Macmillan Company

Wolfe P (1997) lsquoHistory and imperialism a century oftheory from Marx to postcolonialismrsquo TheAmerican Historical Review 102 pp 388ndash420

Eduardo Mendieta University of SanFrancisco

26 CITY VOL 5 NO 1

Robertson R and Garrett WR (eds) (1991) Religionand Global Order Religion and the Political OrderNew York Paragon House

Rothenberg D (1993) Handrsquos End Technology and theLimits of Nature Berkeley University of CaliforniaPress

Sassen S (1991) The Global City New York LondonTokyo Princeton NJ Princeton University Press

Sassen S (1996) Losing Control Sovereignty in anAge of Globalization New York ColumbiaUniversity Press

Sassen S (1998) Globalization and its DiscontentsSelected Essays New York New Press

Sassen S (1999) Guests and Aliens New York NewPress

Sassen S (2000) Cities in a World Economy 2nd ednThousand Oaks CA Pine Forge Press

Scott A ed (1997) The Limits of Globalization NewYork Routledge

Sen A (1999) Development as Freedom New YorkAlfred A Knopf

Shiva V (1991) The Violence of the Green RevolutionThird World Agriculture Ecology and PoliticsLondon and New Jersey Zed Books

Shiva V (1993) Monocultures of the Mind Perspectiveson Biodiversity and Biotechnology London andNew York Zed Books

Shiva V (1997) Biopiracy The Plunder of Nature andKnowledge Boston MA South End Press

Shiva V (1999) Stolen Harverst The Hijacking of theGlobal Food Supply Cambridge MA South EndPress

Short JR Breitbach C Buckman S and Essex J(2000) lsquoFrom world cities to gateway citiesExtending the boundaries of globalization theoryrsquoCity Analysis of Urban Trends Culture TheoryPolicy Action 4 pp 317ndash340

Spybey T (1996) Globalization and World SocietyOxford Polity Press

Stackhouse M and Paris PJ (eds) (2000ndash1) God andGlobalization Vol 1 Religion and the Powers ofthe Common Life Vol 2 The Spirit and theModern Authorities Harrinsburg Trinity PressInternational

State of the Worldrsquos Cities (1999) Cities in a globalizingworldhttpwwwurbanobservatoryorgswc1999citieshtml

Turner BS (1983) Religion and Social Theory LondonSage

United Nations Development Programme (1998) HumanDevelopment Report 1998 New York OxfordUniversity Press

Veseth M (1998) Selling Globalization The Myth ofthe Global Economy Boulder CO and LondonLynne Rienner Publishers

Wallerstein I (1991) Unthinking Social Science TheLimits of Nineteenth-century ParadigmsCambridge Polity

Waters M (1995) Globalization New York RoutledgeWhite DW (1996) The American Century The Rise amp

Decline of the United States as a World PowerNew Haven CT and London Yale University Press

Whitehead AN (1925) Science and the ModernWorld New York Macmillan Company

Wolfe P (1997) lsquoHistory and imperialism a century oftheory from Marx to postcolonialismrsquo TheAmerican Historical Review 102 pp 388ndash420

Eduardo Mendieta University of SanFrancisco